Is Apple’s New Line Of iPods Good For Everyone? No.

It’s hard not to like what Apple has done with the whole iPod line, just in time for the holiday buying season. Timing, it seems, is everything.

The iPod line gets smaller, thinner. Bigger screens, more color. Multi-touch user interface. WiFi. WiFi Music Store. Starbucks. iPhone price cut by $200. Whew. What’s missing?

I’ll come back to that in a moment. There were some grumbles about what Apple did not do. What they did was enough to chew on for days.

Steve Jobs came on stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, almost on time. My intent was to use my cell phone to relay updates back to Kate MacKenzie in New York. That’s the way we do our “Almost Live” coverage of Apple events.

Damn that Treo. Somewhere in the first 10 minutes my phone began acting up. Rather, not act at all. I thought it was battery, but that was charged. No connection. Nothing. Thank you Verizon. Another 20-minutes went by and I borrowed a phone from an AT&T reporter. A RAZR, not an iPhone. At least it worked and I got back on schedule with updates.

The Day of Numbers
The updates were fast and furious. Steve Jobs went through the details in a highly numeric way. By the numbers—Apple has distributed over 600-million copies of iTunes, over 3-billion songs have been bought and downloaded from the iTunes Store.

The Store has over 6-million songs and is the number three music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart and Best Buy. More numbers. 95-million TV shows to date, 125,00 podcasts, 25,000 of them are video podcasts. Oh, 550 TV shows are listed on iTunes Store (not sure if that incudes NBC).

One stunning statistic Jobs mentioned was that 32-percent of music releases last year were digital only, not released on CDs. No wonder the record companies are unhappy. Apple could become a large music distributor and not worry about CDs.

Outside of WiFi, the coolest new feature in iTunes is the ringtone support. It’s built in to iTunes so you can create your own ringtone from songs that are approved as “ringtonable” for just 99-cents 500,000 initially, more over time. We cracked up when Steve Jobs played “Give Peace A Chance” and said he’d use that for when NBC calls back. I haven’t been able to determine if specific songs can be attached to the Contact list.

What about AT&T? Some will say that Apple put a dent in AT&T’s ringtone business and music download business. I don’t think so. After all, Apple’s iPhone represents a small portion of AT&T’s total phone sales, and they keep those customers anyway. Ringtones and music downloads should make iPhone sales spurt.

Today was the day of numbers. Jobs said Apple has sold over 110-million iPods and going in to the holiday season the entire line is being replaced, refreshed, updated. The iPod shuffle looks the same but gets new colors, including (RED).

iPod nano
The iPod nano is Apple’s biggest seller and gets everything but a multi-touch screen and a hard drive. The sceen is much bigger with a crystal clear dense pixel arrangement—more than the iPhone. It’s 2-inches across and 320x240 at 204ppi in a metal case, that looks like a widened iPod nano. Aluminum? Three games are included.

This nano plays back music and video; 24 hours of audio and five hours of video playback on a full charge. Memory is the same, at 4 gigabyte and 8 gigabyte, respectively. The iPod nano GUI is the same click wheel but with more controls to use Cover Flow to rummage through music and videos.

iPod classic
We’re paying hommage to e.e. cummings with all the lower case names. The old iPod with video is now iPod classic and gets what you’d expect. Larger hard drives, 80 gigabytes and 160 gigabytes, respectively, and $249 and $349, respectively. iPod classic gets the same features as the nano in the same enhanced user interface, though the classic is thinner than the previous iPod models.

iPod touch
Looks like we’re not going to see Apple marry a large capacity hard drive to the multi-touch toys. The iPod touch is a thinner iPhone without the phone, though it comes with more storage space. It’s the same multi-touch user interface—pinch, squeeze, stretch, press icons. It looks like an iPhone, but with fewer icons.

The iPod touch interface displayed icons for contacts, calculator, clock, settings, Safari, YouTube, but no Mail. Yes, there’s WiFi 802.11b/g, just like the iPLhone.
This iPod gets 22 hours o audio playback and five hours of video playback on a fully charged battery. Apple upped the flash storage amounts, to 8 gigabytes, and 16 gigabytes for $299 and $399, respectively.

The iPod touch is expected to be released in a few weeks, but well ahead of the holiday shopping season.

Wait. There’s more. More WiFi
All that WiFi means WiFi tools, and that means the WiFi Music Store. Your iPhone and iPod touch will be able to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store via WiFi and an iTunes Store interface. The iTunes WiFi Store will be available in all 22 countries with an iTunes Store.

The Starbucks Downer
Easily bringing the whole show to a screeching halt was AT&T’s CEO being channeled through Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz. A new button on the iPod touch will pick up WiFi at all Starbucks WiFi locations so you can listen to what’s playing at Starbucks and buy the song on your iPod touch or iPhone.

This piece of the event had the feeling like it was thrown together at about 9:20 this morning. Starbucks will roll out Starbucks Aware WiFi to about half their stores in the next two to three years. T

hey’re starting implementation now. This was a real snoozer. A couple of markets might have it by end of 2007, more in 2008, with plans for all WiFi Starbucks to have it by end of 2009.

One More Thing. Really.
Steve Jobs said that Apple is on track to sell 1-million iPhones by the end of the month. To help that along, Apple cut the price of the 8 gigabyte model by $200, to $399. There was no mention of the 4 gigabyte model, but it wasn’t selling well anyway.

The iPhone just fell out of the so-called Smart Phone high end price range. There’s lots of speculation that Macworld 2008 (or, AppleWorld ‘08) in January will see newer models with more memory.

The high end 16 gigabyte iPod touch, which looks like an iPhone with the phone, is priced the same as the 8 gigabyte iPhone. The entire line of iPods and iPhones range from $79 to $399 with the biggest gap between the iPod shuffle and nano.

Grumblings, moanings, and groanings settled on these main issues. No Mail icon in the iPod touch. VoIP like iChat or Skype in the iPod touch. No camera in the iPod touch. There was the distinct feeling that Apple is stringing along the market, but will add such features at some point in the future. Like six months.

What’s missing? What were you expecting? Share your disappointment in the comment section below.