It's not like this is some must have product. It's a *music player*.
Buy one and move on. Jeez.
As I watched yesterday’s Apple event unfold, I can honestly say that the new iPod lineup failed to inspire me.
Check out the image gallery detailing all the new hardware unveiled today!
First off, there was no capacity boost for the Classic hard drive-based line of players. $249 continues to buy you 160GB. Nothing new there.
Then there was the iPod touch revamp. It’s now closer to being an iPhone without the phone than ever, but there’s nothing really revolutionary there.
The iPod nano gets smaller, loses the clickwheel and gets what seems like a pointless multitouch screen. In the deal it loses a camera and the ability to play back video. It also gets a clip.
The iPod shuffle takes a step back. The buttonless design that Apple introduced last year has been abandoned in favor of a design reminiscent of the older design featuring physical buttons. Apple is one of the few companies I know that can take a step backward and brand it a major leap forward.
Smaller, thinner, buttonless … that seems to be the general trend. But this is just tweaking, and it seems like it’s being done just for the sake of tweaking. We (and by that I mean the tech industry more than the the buying public) demand that Apple continually revamp its line of media players, partly because Apple is an industry leader in that area, but mostly because it’s one of the few companies that bothers to compete in the market.
I’m not sure the buying public care much about product line revamps (it just means having to buy new cases and so on), and it seems that the Apple idea well has run dry. I think that minor tweaks are all we can hope for the iPod line from here on. There’s no real “Wow!” factor to this lineup for the holiday season, and I think Apple knows this.
