Apple Showtime: summary
Apple’s ‘Showtime’-event focussed on digital media just ended 2 hours ago, and like with augusts WWDC keynote, I’m not too impressed with the outcome. check TechCrunch for a brief summary or Engadget for an extremley detailed live-blog + hands-on reports with all products.
as expected, iTMS now sells feature-movie downloads for as low as $13 (pre-orders and first-week buyers) and $15 (regular price) - that’s right in the middle of Amazon’s Unbox rates ($8-20). movies are encoded in 640×480 H.264 (nearly DVD-quality), include Dolby Surround, and can of course be put on any video-enabled iPod under the same DRM-restrictions as iTMS tv-shows. while this sounds fine, the downside is that - as of today - the iTMS is starting with a mere 75 movie-titles from several Disney-studios.
Apple supplements the iTMS with iTunes 7 (cosmetic changes on the user-interface, album-artwork and gapless playback - a feature I ranted about some time ago) and several new iPod-models. there’s a new aluminium Nano in four selected colours (remember the mini-days) a tiny, square successor to the Shuffle (very cool) and an upgraded 5.5G iPod (better battery life, lower price, more storage - yawn). still missing: the touchscreen-video-iPod which is rumoured about since…well, anyway.
one more thing - iTV (codename!), a streaming-client connecting to any TV-set is announced for early 2007. through a Frontrow-like interface, iTV will bring your existing iTunes-library to your living-room. iTV won’t include any storage itself, and it’s unclear if it will be able to access media-files on a non-iTunes-fileshare or NAS-device (probably not, and even if, there won’t be any support for your pirated backup-divx 
).
[...] ps: try this sample showcasing the iPod-arcade-games introduced yesterday [...]
[...] iTunes 7 received loads of bad press immediately after last weeks release. especially Windows-users complain about heavily increased CPU- and memory-load, disfunctional download of cover-artwork, problems with certain iPod-models and destroyed installations. this reminds a lot of itTunes 6, which was quite buggy in its inital release as well (lets remember this when iTunes 8 arrives! ). while we wait for salvation in the form of a - hopefully not too distant - upgrade, this MacWorld UK-article lists Apple’s official support-documents addressing the issues. [...]