It's that time of year for new iPods. Quite a few rumors surrounding this event regarding a new Apple TV, new form factor for the Nano, and an iPhone 4 like iPod Touch. And for the first time since 2002, Apple is live streaming the event. Popular theories on why range from Apple wanting to test out their new datacenter, to this being a way of dealing with the MiFi WiFi problem from the previous event.

For anyone on OS X 10.6, or an iPhone/iPad/iPod touch, the stream will be available at apple.com at 10AM PDT. People on other platforms are out of luck for this one, unless you have a program handy to work with the IETF draft for HTTP live streaming. Apple has a test stream here.

Well on my macbook that test link works with Safari. No go with Firefox 4 beta and the latest version for Chrome.

I wonder what those of us with the older AppleTV will get? I'm guessing a goodbye and thanks for your support.

I'm still trying to figure out why it's better to deny flash, while there's a majority of people out here that can't watch this. Apple really would rather I sit here watching a slow-moving stream of text and photos than watch their slick video presentation?


That's exactly what I assumed until I realized that I wouldn't be able to watch it. Given the number of people who can't, I highly doubt that there will be any fewer press people with MiFis in the audience.

For all of you disenfranchised (like me), I find the best live blogging coverage is at GDGT.

*edit*
I'm fairly close to a decent viewing experience by watching the GDGT stream, while watching/listening to TWiT.

Flash wouldn't help here. It would actually make it worse, since it requires custom backend for live streaming. Apple is simply pushing out files, and Akamai is simply serving HTTP requests. It scales well, since Akamai is already set up to host tons of HTTP content. Apple published the standard with an industry recognized standards body, not their fault other companies haven't chosen to implement it.

You can see Akamai's stats for streaming here:
http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz3.html

It's shot up like crazy since the event started.

I'll hold back any feedback till it's over though, still plenty to go.

No, but it's their fault for using it if nobody has adopted it. At the very least, they have nothing to complain about if there's still dozens of MiFis in the room.

No matter, I think I like listening to TWiT more anyway. That way I'm getting decent commentary, instead of listening to Steve being his usual smug self, and then hearing a room full of press people applauding (which always bugs the hell out of me).

Well, to be quite honest and blunt, why would Apple want to spend more money on using someone else's technology to stream an event to someone like yourself, who continues to bag on Apple all the time about how smug they are and isn't likely to buy any of their products anyhow? I can't even imagine how much money Apple is spending already to stream this. Add in the overhead for doing Flash based RTSP streaming (that works poorly behind corporate firewalls) and that cost would skyrocket.

I was wrong about one thing, Adobe does also support HTTP streaming with Flash. http://www.adobe.com/products/httpdynamicstreaming/ No idea how open their implementation is though. Adobe says open, but I can't find a spec sheet for it with the IETF or a similar group.

They really only care about people that drink their kool-aid, so why pander to different audiences? I was interested in watching but lost interest when I discovered my modern browser can't play it.

I've noticed Steve doesn't use the word "are" - everything seems to be "is" - awkward.

So far everything is as expected and rumored. He's spending WAY too much time on the social features of iTunes, called "Ping." We get it, it's all been done before, it's called Last.FM.

I'd like to know if they've re-written iTunes to be faster. Gotten rid of any of the BS behavior it has or made any improvements to allow it to work with non-music media without UI elements that refer to music-specific properties.

Maybe they have another app. That would be nice, because iTunes for anything other than music is kind of ultra-crap.

Because I don't represent all the people who can't watch this. Are you saying that there are no Windows users out there who use iPods and want to watch this event? I'd bet there are.

As for the event its self, all the updates look good, especially the nano, which is a really nice form factor.

I'm not hot on Ping.

The Live broadcast cut out and went back to people arriving at the event just as Steve was starting his recap.

Apple TV at $99 sounds nice at first, but I suspect it's about $60 too expensive if it's missing what I think it's missing...

Namely 1080p playback and the ability to play back all codec and wrapper formats.

I think $4.99 for a 24 hour movie rental is way too expensive as well, but I'm sure the device will still sell relatively well. IMO, renting should get you at LEAST 48 hours, preferably 36, regardless of price.

Being able to hand off playback from an iOS device is somewhat nice, but not as nice as being able to hand off in the other direction. Imagine - watching something on the TV and going to the can/bed while continuing to watch on your iPad.

Specs are up on Apple.com. A4 chip powered. 720p max. No DTS sound at all, no AC3 decoding capabilities, H.264 only, using only mp4, m4v and mov container formats. I only rip to MKV (H.264) and direct MPEG2 ISO files.

Sorry, I would't use this thing if I could get the box for free.

I think the analogy of Leo on TWiT was pretty good: they hit a single, double, triple, and then they fouled out.

The shuffle is okay (and it's hilarious that Steve allowed buttons to be added). The nano, I think, is the highlight with a fantastic form factor. The Touch is not only just what they needed to do, but more than I expected. The Touch used to be the iPhone without the phone and several important features. Now it is exactly the iPhone without the phone.

The AppleTV and iTunes were a little underwhelming. I do not like Ping, and don't think it will be a successful network. Not only is it a walled garden, which is bad for a social network, but you have to have a piece of software installed to even look at it. I don't have to be a member of Twitter to view its content, but I have to download, install, and sign up for iTunes to view its content.

The AppleTV update was very minor. The most important part of it was the price drop, frankly. They didn't add anything at all that many other devices didn't already have for over a year now (everything has Netflix in it now, and I disagree with Steve that this is the best implementation of it). Essentially it's a Roku box, but Roku has a great deal of content that AppleTV won't have.

I'd also love to know if Apple did indeed plan to name the AppleTV iTV, but it looks like they didn't get to take that name. That's a first. It looks like Ping.fm might be pretty pissed off, though

I also think the coolest thing shown was the iPod Nano. Too bad they don't have a 32GB model. And too bad the music playing software still looks like it sucks, like on all the other iPods.

This unit is more like an iPod Pico, and at the risk of cluttering up their product line and price points, they really could have released a new iPod Mini that would have been the size of the old Nano's screen, all touch, WITH a camera on the back. That would have maintained the extra display real-estate and camera of the old Nano in the new product line. This new Nano is very cool, but it really appeals to different use desires than the old one. It's like a Shuffle with a screen, I'm sure people are really going to miss the camera and larger display.



I can't think of anything that was added to the iPod to match the iPhone other than a camera. It's still missing an ear-level speaker and GPS.

Obviously it took the new parts of the iPhone 4 like the front camera and retina display, but I'm saying that it didn't really get anything added to this generation other than the camera, to bring it any closer to the iPhone 4 than the previous generation to the iPhone 3Gs.

Well, the old AppleTV couldn't play any variety of formats at all. Just one kind, pretty much. I'm very disappointed that the press is giving a pass on not having 1080p. All the podcasts I've listened to are saying it's no big deal and that 720p is good enough. I know it's good enough, but 1080p is a standard now, most of the TVs today are capable of it, and not even supporting it is a cop-out. I know it would use a lot of bandwidth, making it hard to stream, but that's no excuse to not let the hardware even support it for the future. It makes me wonder if the hardware could even support it, given how underpowered the old AppleTV was. They didn't mention what the innards were. I wonder if it's the A4 or not...


Yeah, I think $4.99 is still a little pricey. $3.99 would be really good, $2.99 would see me preordering an AppleTV today...


You're right! Oops!

Maybe I'm the only one but I wish the iTouch would come out with an internal GPS.

Here's the real-world implication of the lack-lustre Apple TV.

Someone already using some other misc streaming device, no matter how crappy it is, isn't going to be able to play back their (small, medium, HUGE) file-based video collection from their computer(s) when they pick up a new Apple TV.

From the document itself, paraphrasing what the term "Internet-Draft" means:

The idea that 720p is "good enough" for a set-top media player released in late 2010 is preposterous. It looks to me like they crippled it to bring the price point down, driving sales up, and creating more demand for the 1080p version they'll release in six months or so. That's the only way I can see them competing with Boxee Box, Google TV and friends when they're on 1080p with a lot more content options.

I concur with the sentiment that all the iPods are nice, but as someone who's in the market to buy a HTPC type box in the near future, I was hoping for something decent from Apple, if only to put pressure on the Boxee Box and Google TV guys. This ain't it, and makes me wonder how they managed to screw up this product line yet again.

The Apple TV is a movie and TV rental box. That's it. 1080p is too bandwidth intensive for them to stream in high quality. I suspect it's also too much for the A4 chip to handle since it doesn't have silicon dedicated to that task.

Apple will compete and do so well because of their market presence and brand. I will buy a Boxee Box when it comes out, but even with my sale, I'd be surprised if they could pull off even 5% of Apple's sales. Google might fare better, but I don't have high hopes for them either in this market.

I think Apple is going to move a lot more boxes than they did with the previous generations. I don't know if they've done enough to jump it out of Hobby class though.


And back to the iPod... Everyone wishes that the iPod touch had a GPS. Well, everyone except TomTom and Garmin of course. Apple might not have wanted to dedicate any internal space for the AGPS receiver, or it might strictly be based on iPhone differentiation.

This thing is, at the very least, going to put a huge dent in the sales of pocket HD video recorders. Nice to be able to send the video over WiFi so you can then clean out your flash and record more video.

Google's box will be more confusing to the average consumer, and that will hurt it. But they've already said they'll have apps, which is what everyone was hoping the AppleTV would have, and that might get it as many sales as the AppleTV. I agree that the Boxee Box will not sell nearly as many as either of these companies.


There are only two reasons they'll sell more than they did before: lower price for the box, and lower price for TV shows. Lower prices for movies would have helped a lot. Netflix is probably already on something else a person buying an AppleTV has, since Netflix is already on about 337 different devices.



My guess for why there's no GPS is because Apple doesn't want people using the Touch as a nav system because without a cellular data connection, there's no way to get map data. It would probably be harder to cache all the map data an user would want than to just not let the user do GPS.


One question about the Touch's camera: am I wrong, or did I hear correctly that it's not as good quality as the iPhone's camera? I think it's lower res...

No quality GPS application downloads data over a data connection. That's only what bottom of the barrel monthly-plan crap-ware carrier-branded software does. There are probably more than 3 or 4 very good GPS apps iOS that include the data with their downloads and regularly update the software and data through the store. TomTom, Navigon and CoPilot are the three names that I already know quite well.



You overestimate how big map data is. It's small - all things considered.



You're right. It's just over 0.5 Megapixels. Or just under SVGA or just over VGA, however you want to refer to it. I just say it's useless for stills.

It also doesn't have an LED flash nor can you manually focus (tap or otherwise) it seems in video or still mode. Its still photos will in fact only be ever so slightly larger than your actual display, 960x720. UGH. What is that, like 1997 Digicam levels?

The only advantages over the iPhone:

Much smaller and lighter
Available with up to 64GB (actually 59GB)
Doesn't cost $800

I'd love an iPhone and I'd be willing to forego the first two, but that last one is a real stickler.

I'm not saying that. There are likely plenty of people in Windows land, or even Linux land, Android land or whatever that want to watch it. And there isn't a solution that would work for 100% of the people. If this was the only way to get the information, I'm sure Apple would have put much more effort into making sure it could be seen. But it wasn't the only way. Thousands of bloggers around the world are busy writing up articles and posting them. Hundreds of news organizations are doing the same. And of course even Apple was busy creating new content for Apple.com detailing everything talked about. Part of that will even be a standards based H.264 file download of the entire event.

Always remember Apple is a very focused and streamlined company. They are going to do the minimum amount of effort for the most amount of impact, instead of trying to cover every possibility along the way. They will also always use their own technology above any other, just like many other companies. Last I checked, Microsoft still only offers streams of their events in wither Windows Media formats meant to be streamed to IE and Windows Media, or more recently to Silverlight platforms. That doesn't cover 100% either. And nor does Flash.

As for the repeated smug and koolaid comments, well, clearly nothing said in the past has really altered anyones opinions here even with engineers of the company explaining the situation. Guess I should start calling Google people smug for being happy with what works for them, and koolaid drinkers for being excited about Android and GMail and Chrome OS and whatever new thing comes from them.

I'll go through the rest of the event later to figure out what was actually announced. Been a busy day at the office, and was pulled away right around the time iTunes 10 was announced. I'm guessing it's not a major rewrite like I was hoping for from what I saw so far.

Oh, I'll say something else positive about the AppleTV. Its price point, regardless of its capabilities, is probably going to cause a ripple effect in the industry.

Though I've been hoping for a long time that its UI would do the same, so far everyone else sees fit to ship next to unusable interfaces.

Why? The AppleTV interface is really no different than half the other players out there. They all follow the main menus along one axis and then sub-menus along the other.

What?

I'm not talking about Boxee here, but rather people like ViewSonic, Netgear and even WD.

Most companies don't show their UI at all on their web sites or press materials. That's a huge alarm because it means that the UI was designed and implemented by the same guy who's responsible for collecting the open source code and the code given to them by the SoC vendor and glueing it together. It means the UI is going to be pretty crap.

The Apple TV UI has issues, but it also has a lot of strengths, and it is most certainly not crap in the same sense as the test-based, file-browsing pieces of crap I see most everywhere else. There's a good amount of graphics flare and multiple ways to browse your collection, plus of course cover art and meta data - something most other boxes don't have at all.

For Photos, its slideshow looks really great and so far its library selection still also looks better than everyone else's. No else one has done photos at a level even close to "fair" let alone something very usable. Even Boxee's photo UI sucks very badly. Frankly, I'd rather Boxee not support photos at all than keep the UI they have in there now.

Sorry, I think we're just talking about different aspects of the UI. When you say "so far everyone else sees fit to ship next to unusable interfaces," I take that to mean the actual method with which you navigate around the interface. I wouldn't say that Apple's wasn't more attractive than most of the boxes out there (it is), but overall Boxee is FAR more attractive than Apple's very plain, boring UI.

And I stand behind my statement that the actual navigation is no different than half of the other boxes. You select your activity on one axis, then drill down into that activity on the other to pick what you want to do. In fact, after that, it's really not that different from the iPod media player from a navigation standpoint, which I thought you hated.

One point I definitely won't argue on is that Apple made the best slideshow device I've ever used. I love how it displays photos, although the "Ken Burns Effect" occasionally cuts off people's heads I'm not kidding when I say my #1 favorite thing about the AppleTV is the screensaver. My dad and I used to sit there listening to music and watching the photos scroll by. It was so fun to pick out photos to comment on. Fantastic.


It's funny. For the longest time, the UI clearly emphasized Apple's content over your personal collection. The very first item in all the top-level menus was always for iTunes store content (browsing movies and music to purchase). But recently with the last update, I think they actually made your own content the top item. Now this new box is clearly focused on Apple's content again. Oh well.

Apart from Boxee, AppleTV and very recently perhaps the new PopBox, there isn't a device out there with a usable UI. That means method of navigation, what it shows you when you navigate, how easy it is to find your media, etc. As a whole, the UIs look terrible, don't offer you any usable information besides maybe a filename, including extension, and have really really (REALLY) bad performance.

The WD box has some attention to the UI, but it's still really just about files and doesn't know anything about the media nor metadata. Apart from the devices I've just mentioned, no one else is at all concerned about UI nor what gets displayed on the screen apart from perhaps being able to decode the video files. Even simply pausing or skipping around though a file is a painful experience on most boxes. Unfortunately Boxee still doesn't have this right either, since in their current beta it still freezes up the video if you skip more than twice in succession. The BEST for this is SageTV, bar none. Three sets of forward skip, three sets of backward skip. You can change the amount of seconds/time for any of them.

Catching back up to all the news today (and apologies for the snarky attitude earlier towards the smug and koolaid references, while they do get old, i've just been in a really weird mood this week with work).

Buttons back on the Shuffle was a good move. It does show Apple pays attention to the sales numbers closely, and is willing to reverse course when needed.

The new Nano seems interesting, but odd new touch gestures there to navigate it. Will be interesting to try one out and actually see how it works in person.

The touch was pretty much what people expected, and is usually pretty easy to predict since it follows the new iPhone in July.

iTunes 10, WTF is up with the close minimize and zoom buttons going vertical even in normal view mode? Also, looks like they took out color from most of the interface, going to a graphite look everywhere. And it still will cause video playback to stutter a bit when an iPhone is plugged into the system. Hopefully iTunes 11 will do something about that.

Also not sure what to think about Ping. Having never used or even looked at Last.fm much at all, not really familiar with the concept.

The new AppleTV doesn't interest me a ton currently, but it will depend on what they do with the old unit (if anything). AirPlay would be nice for video, and I have been pondering a Netflix subscription. The existing AppleTV I have though seems more capable then the new unit though, especially with the hackability. Currently it plays all my DVD rips off my ReadyNAS Ultra, due to the ease of having it run DVD Player.app.

Implemented by the same guy that designed the menu and interface in all the random brand DVD players IMO.

A couple thoughts on the new AppleTV:

The $99 price point is big. That's getting into impulse buy territory for the sort of people who queue up a day in advance for a new iPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if they sell a million of them, even if half of those go largely unused after installation.

Apple has fixed many of the bugs with the current AppleTV, most notably the insanely high idle power consumption. Also, it's now cheaper than an Airport Express for audio streaming.

The Boxee Box, for contrast, is ostensibly coming in at "under $200" (what, $199.95?). Of course it does a lot more, but it wil cost a lot more as well. At Boxee, I'm sure they're sweating bullets over this. I suspect that Boxee is also sweating over Apple having a reasonable library of "real" content to rent, while Boxee presumably hasn't been able to make similar deals.

I find it curious that Apple supports NetFlix (ostensibly a competitor!) while not supporting Pandora or other such music services. Clearly, there's something calculated going on here. This could be the opening that Boxee and its app model need to gain some leverage. On the flip side, I'm curious how well the new AppleTV hardware will run the Boxee software. My old AppleTV was a great box for Boxee, except that it would overheat and crap out. (To watch a one-hour show, I have to put an ice pack on it first.) Notice that Apple has a discrete little USB port on the back? That's the way you installed the original patchstick. It's almost like they're inviting the hackers in.

I find Apple's remote control to be absurdly useless. For contrast, the iPhone/iPod Touch UI is clearly the way to go. Too bad for everybody who doesn't have one. (Maybe I've got a use for my now-inactive iPhone 3G?)