Apple’s Announcements

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I'm spending a little time this morning watching the iMac, iWork, iLife Event in preparation for the announcements today regarding the new iPods. Unfortunately, there's no one covering the event today, which is a bummer, but there's no way I'm going to travel for the announcement, and I can't blame anyone else for not going either. But the rumor sites are all a buzz about the confirmed full-screen iPod - if anything can be considered to be confirmed from Apple before it's actually announced.

As for the event, I have to hand it to Steve, the guy is a Showman, no doubt about it. I have to say that it's interesting to see him play to the smaller house on the Apple campus. As I watch the presentation I'm struck by the fact that anyone in the creative arts with talent makes it look easy, and makes us all want to join in. Basketball, painting, story telling, and in this case, movie making (iMovie '08) - it doesn't really matter what it is - we see this done my a really gifted individual and they make it look so easy.

Yes, I have to give it to Steve... he makes these presentations look easy. I can't wait to see what he's got cooking for today.

UPDATE: I can't believe that the new full-screen iPods are only flash-based and only go up to 16GB. I understand that the new features are nice - WiFi, etc. and I can see that Apple wants to be able to extend the battery life to something much longer than the current 4 hours, but to limit the machine to 16GB is a big of a dumb thing to do. I'm not sure I'm even interested in this model any more. It certainly places the iPod and iPhone in much greater competition with one another. I'd have thought that a hard disk-based iPod would have cut the battery life, but boosted storage so that they were not in any real competition with one another. I guess we'll have to wait for the next update to the iPods because I can't believe I'm going to look at 16GB and think "Hey, that's half of what I have now with a 4 yr old iPod, but let's get it!"