All the Rumors Are True, and Then Some
As they say, Mac shares rise on rumors and fall on news. Apple is down about $3 so far, but not because people are disappointed. Maybe it’s true this time because the news is virtually identical to the rumors that have been going on for the past several weeks. There are few surprises here. Ringtones, Red Shuffle, Phat Nano, iPod Touch. There were, however, a couple of news bits that nobody expected, especially in regard to the iPhone.
First, Ringtones. This is actually kind of disappointing. Apple has the absolute technological ability to let you assign any sound you could possibly want to assign as a ringtone… but instead they’re gonna charge you. In fact, they will charge you for the same song twice… once for downloading the song, and you pay another dollar to use that song as a ringtone. I don’t think anyone is excited about this. Rather, I think everyone is wondering when the next ringtone hack will allow people to set any audio file as a ringtone.
Image borrowed (ahem) from Engadget
The Phat Nano is exactly as the spy/rumor photos had it; wide, squat, with a 2“ screen at QVGA (320 x 240) resolution–in other words, the exact same resolution as the full-sized 5G iPods, except with a 2” screen instead of a 2.5“ screen. (The previous Nano had a 176 x 132 pixel screen at 1.5”, by the way.) What’s more, the new Nanos can play video, and can do games now, like Sudoku. They’re not touch-screen, but they do have a new interface and they do have Cover Flow (slow and choppy, they say), in case you like that sort of thing. Essentially, it’s a 5G iPod scaled down to Nano proportions.
The 4GB Nano sells for $150, the 8GB for $200. On sale in stores from next weekend.
There is one surprise in here, actually: the iPod Classic. It’s essentially a retained 5G iPod, but with the new UI, a bigger hard disk (up to 160 GB!), and a new form factor, though close to the old one. The 80GB version is now $100 cheaper, priced at $250; the 160 GB version is at the old top price of $350.
But the big deal at the event is obviously the full-screen, touch-screen 6G iPod. It is, essentially, an iPhone… without the phone or the camera. And pretty much those seem to be the only things that are missing.
Same sized screen as the iPhone, same resolution–but thinner in form. Otherwise, it looks just like the iPhone. It has the motion sensor for tilting and Cover Flow.
And it has WiFi. And Safari. Web browsing on your iPod. The touch-screen keyboard and everything. The iPhone YouTube app is there as well. And, of course, you can sync your address book and calendar.
22 hours audio, 5 hours video on the new battery (your milage will vary, downwards, of course).
But more news: you can buy tunes from the iTS using WiFi, directly on the iPod. Eat that, Zune! The iPhone gets the same feature in a firmware upgrade later in September.
Surprise: no hard drive. They’re making the transition to flash memory, it seems. Probably with the next big release, they’ll phase out the iPod “Classic” and start upping the GB of flash memory, I suppose.
Pricing: $300 for the 8GB, $400 for the 16GB.
On the lighter side, Apple is partnering with Starbucks, giving free WiFi access to iPod users–but apparently only access to the iTunes Store, so you can buy the songs they’re playing at Starbucks. Looks like no free Internet browsing, sorry. Just a sales angle.
One more thing… actually, pretty big news: the 8GB iPhone gets cut in price by 33%–from $600 to $400! That’s a pretty hefty price cut. I guess they figured that they made as much as they reasonably could by charging high prices while the hype was sky-high, and now can rake in even more by cutting the prices down to “sale” levels for the back-to-school and holiday seasons.
So, what about the second iPhone model?… looks like there ain’t gonna be one. Just 8GB for now.
EDIT: Hey, I just realized one more thing the iPod Touch won’t have that the iPhone does–Bluetooth. No wireless headphones. Hmm.
Wow… super fast update from your blog!!!
Nice update of the whole new iPod line…
Next, ONE MORE THING… L E O P A R D, coming very soon.
Hi Luis,
I’m wondering why people call the new Nano “fat”. It is actually very tiny in thickness any quite tiny for a video player. I think the right word should be the “wide” Nano I think. It may not be the best design but it fits perfectly in the classic iPod line-up. People who only need to watch short video’s should happy with it. I think there is a market for the Wide Nano.
Ciao
Frankie
Oscar: Yep, Leopard is next, coming in just a month (!) or so… but the excitement on that is a bit muted, as the OS is less than people expected… not nearly as many “top secret”-worthy features as Jobs made us believe there would be. I’m not sure if I’ll be using Time Machine, myself, and Spaces would be more impressive if they had multiple Desktops along with the multiple window groups… but am looking forward to screen sharing at a distance, and the new Finder features will be nice. Otherwise, there’s not really that much that seems to be in there. Will Spotlight be improved? Hopefully so. It’ll be upgrade-worthy, but not an incredibly impressive one, I think. Slightly Vista-like, in fact… but of course, Apple takes only two years to do this kind of upgrade, not five or six.
Frankie: actually, I was using what some rumor sites dubbed it as–“Phat,” referring to the wideness, but also the slang expression “Pretty Hot And Tasty.” Wide works fine for me, too.
It might actually not be Apple’s fault that ringtones cost extra.
Ringtones are big business for the music industry. Some one-hit artists earn more off ringtones from their big hit than they do from sales of their albums.
The RIAA is incredibly greedy, and they want to keep prices of ringtones up around 3-5 dollars, whether people already own the songs or not. There’s a good chance that they bitched about even this.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had a couple other secrets about Leopard that they just haven’t leaked yet…
Ah, I would absolutely hope so… and it might be possible…
But frankly, I doubt it quite a bit. We’re only 1 month from release. To keep some big features secret that close to release, without getting people to test it, it’s just not that likely.
But, as always, we can hope.
I think the key point of today’s sermon from Mt. Jobs was that the iPhone now costs $200 less. Makes me glad I’m not an early adopter, for one, and I’d argue that this is the main reason share prices fell.
And the “free Wi-Fi in Starbucks?” Please.
It is of course up to you if you want to be exclusively pro-Apple, but I was moved to make these comments because your sense of skepticism is usually more healthy.
BJ:
Re: “free WiFi access”–read all the way through that paragraph. I went on to say, “but apparently only access to the iTunes Store, so you can buy the songs they’re playing at Starbucks. … Just a sales angle.” That’s cynicism, not “pro-Apple,” unless you admire such sales angles.
About the iPhone price cut, yeah–people are even seeing it as a mistake. Early adopters are somewhat ticked off, and everyone else is now thinking that Apple is desperate to up sales. Not the smoothest move. But I think my reasoning is still correct: Apple fleeced the eager early adopters, and wanted the price cut to appeal to the masses now that the early adopters have their phones.
The price cut looked bad mainly because Apple didn’t fill the upper price range. Had they released a 16GB model for $500, especially if it had some new feature that was not on the 8GB model, then early adopters would think, “I got the top-of-the-line, and now the top of the line just got upgraded with a $100 cut.” They’d still be upset, but not nearly as much, even though the 8GB price cut would be identical.
It’s as if Apple designed the 8GB price cut to be the lower end to a bigger new phone, but they didn’t have the phone ready. It even felt like Job’s presentation was cut off without full resolution, like something was dropped at the last minute or something. Even if Jobs had just said, “we’ve got a high-end iPhone I can;t tell you about quite yet, and it will fill the high-end gap,” he would have saved a lot of face.
However, it is a mistake to say that Apple shares fell because of the price cut–about half of the stock price fall happened before that particular point was even announced. As I said at the top, Apple’s stock rises on rumors and falls on news, usually. Maybe it dropped one or two dollars more because of the price cut, but not more than that. And that will likely go back up when large numbers of people go out and buy the new iPhones at lower prices. If I were holding out because of the high cost, this would certainly prompt me to go and buy one.
There’s also another possibility: the European iPhone is coming out soon, and that will likely be 3G. If Apple needs to sell pre-built stock before that release date in order to clear the channel for a 3G release, this would be a good way to do that….
Re: “free WiFi access”–read all the way through that paragraph.
Fair enough, and I did, the first time I read the post. My reaction had to do with the way you opened the paragraph — I wanted immediate sarcasm. I felt as though the inattentive reader would have skimmed past the the end part, and that you should have started off in a more sarcastic tone. Sometimes scare quotes are a good thing.
Regarding the stock prices: I’ll accept your interpretation. I didn’t look at the data as closely as you did.
Re: the network: The audacity of Apple to ship v1.0 with access only to the slow Edge network — at least here in the US — is one of three reasons why I had no interest in iPhones. (The other two are the lock-in to AT&T and the lack of a direct API for third-party developers.)
Shortly after shipping, I came across a fourth reason. ;^)
BJ:
Actually, I have a confession to make: I was typing that as I watched the reports of the keynote. I saw “free WiFi access at Starbucks,” thought “Wow!” and typed down what you reacted to–and then read the rest of it and came down with the rest of the sentence. So what you were seeing was not me being fully-informed during the whole sentence, and I didn’t take the time (at 3:00 am Japan time) to re-edit before going to bed.
As for the network: I am still a bit mystified by the EDGE decision; they should have known they’d go 3G soon after. But then, they would have taken a beating had they released an iPhone with super-sucky battery life, and WiFi did dull the “Edge” of the network complaint, at least somewhat.
Still, Fake Steve Jobs had the best take on it: “Dear early iPhone adopters: Yeah, we f*cked you.”
Actually, I have a confession to make
Thanks for the clarification.
As for the network: …
Does accessing 3G networks eat up battery life more than accessing Edge networks?
I was on the fence about the initial explanations for this decision. On the one hand, yeah, most early adopters would probably be within range of a Wi-Fi network. On the other, many early adopters would be road warrior-types; i.e., the sort who spend lots of time in airports. I don’t know about Japan, but the US airports suck for free Wi-Fi — the pay networks have long since pwned them.
I was expecting v2.0 of the iPhone to be a 3G-accessible device. I advised my Apple-loving friends to wait for this. I wonder if, for some reason, they can’t get the bugs out of the faster networking, and so had to drop the price, just to have a story to tell.
You really think it’s all about the battery life? I could conceive that it could be, as I’m clueless on such matters. But that really sounds weird.
Oops. Forgot one thing.
Is Fake Steve Jobs still posting? I thought he’d shut down after being outed. If he is, I’m glad to hear it. We need more court jesters in this world.
Thanks for the links.