Pretty standard fare, and everything here had been aired before, except for the new shuffle. Which I have absolutely no use for, yet feel compelled to purchase.
I splashed out on the new 80gb iPod. I still prefer the dimensions of the 30gb, but I’ve just about outgrown my 30gb 5G, and the higher end model has a bigger cache, which means better battery life. I wish they had replaced the 30gb with a 60gb in the same form factor.
Speaking of batteries, the improved battery life of the line is much needed in light of Apple’s big video push. I’ve never had an issue with it when playing music, but my 5G sucks the battery dry in no time when watching video, even when it’s just output to a TV. 6.5 hours of video use sounds just great.
The 5G gets improvements via firmware: brightness control, letter popup when scrolling, and games. But no search. Some owners are pissed that they don’t get everything. Come on guys, you get a free upgrade. Be happy with that.
I’m sure a wave of copycats will be following soon. Every time I see one of these devices, I just shake my head. Nobody else seems to get it. They can’t even get the name right, stuffing it full of user-meaningless numbers and identifiers.
People are already bemoaning that this isn’t the “True Video iPod” they’ve been longing for. Guys, yes. Yes, it is. It’s the true video iPod. What you want is the hypothetical video iPod; please refer to it as such.
I don’t think anyone expected this, but it’s a sensible move. Makes sense if/when they move to the cellphone market. I think it has the potential to serve as the model for that transition: subsuming the communications functionality into the iPod, instead of grafting a MP3 player onto a phone.
I got Bejeweled, somewhat skeptical of using the click wheel as a game control, but it works fairly well.
An acquaintance tells me that a developer friend of his asked him if he wanted to work on one of the games, so he knew beforehand. He said this today, after the announcement. Gee, thanks for the heads up.
A very welcome improvement. 320×240 was too small to watch on anything other than an iPod’s teeny screen. They’re now watchable on my 15″ MacBook Pro, and as good or better quality than what you’d find on a torrent. Two thumbs up.
Pretty much everyone expected this. Quality is very good. It’s not quite DVD quality, but it’s very close. It’s a little blockier and has some h.264 noise. Most people probably won’t notice. It’s 1.3gb for 2 hours, 1.5mbit @640×346. Widescreen, which is both a plus and a minus. One of my issues with the TV shows in iTS was that shows shot in widescreen (like Lost) were delivered in 1.33:1. I’m very glad to see that they aren’t butchering movies.
The flip side is that they play back widescreen on the iPod, which makes them near unwatchable.
They have chapter markers, which is a very good thing.
I don’t know if it was just because the iTS was swamped, but my movie took quite a while to download. I went to sleep before it was done, but the estimated time said 3 hours. I tried playing it while it was downloading and got audio, but no video. Not good.
Very slick. Vastly improved video playback. It also blocked QTFairUse6 from working, but QTFairUse6 was updated to work again the same day. Which just goes to show that this DRM war is unwinnable. Bruce Schneier put it extremely well: “trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.”
Gapless playback is, in a word, sexy. iTunes took a while to scan my library, and now it just works, even on my 5G iPod. Very well done.
Lots of improvements overall. Lots of people are angry, lots of people like it. I like it.
Pure lust. I want one, right now. It’s a brilliant move. While everyone else is fighting over Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, Apple can leapfrog that mess and deliver HD downloads. It’s a compelling proposition. A $300 investment – a pittance compared to the HD disc players out there – gets you HD video now. You can watch it on your SDTV, and it’ll be HD when you upgrade to plasma, or LCD, or whatever.
Two things to note with this. First, it doesn’t have DVI output, only HDMI. Apple is fairly well-known for it’s amazing displays, so it seems a bit strange to have a device that can’t connect to them. Which makes me wonder if there’s an Apple HDMI-enabled display coming around the same time as iTV.
Secondly, the preannouncement itself. Lots of people are puzzling over this. Apple never preannounces products like that. I think they may be doing it to put pressure on the movie studios that balked at providing their films for download. Like Apple’s middle finger to them, saying look what we’re doing, and you’re not with us. I guess we’ll see, but that’s the best theory I have at the moment.