Apple’s had it’s big “It’s Showtime” press event just a couple of hours ago, and I’m still struggling to figure out what the hoopla was about. Modestly upgraded iPods, adding movies and TV shows at higher resolution to iTunes, and iTV – which is basically Airport Express for video. Uh-huh. Okay. That’s nice and all. But where’s the other stuff, the more important stuff, the stuff we’ve been waiting for Apple to deliver?

Where are the Core 2 Duo-based MacBook Pros? How about a video iPod with a four-inch screen? Or downloadable movies with something a little better than “near-DVD quality” resolution? Even the iTV, the big “One Last Thing” announcement that’s meant to wow us, is little more than a wireless router with video outputs. How about being able to record TV programming directly off an antenna or cable? Windows XP Media Center’s been able to do that for years.

It’s nice to see iPod play times extended while the quality of the screens and the iPod Nano cases (and colors) improved. But how about an iPod with a screen large enough to actually see a movie properly. Archos has been offering bigger screens for years; even Doghouse Electronics has managed to one up Apple on the almighty screen. I will admit, however, that the new iPod shuffle is pretty cool – with each new rev Apple gets closer and closer to an iPod you can just have embedded subdermally.

As for downloadable movies – that’s nice and all, but paying $15 for a movie you can’t burn to a DVD? You can buy the same movie on a DVD that offers higher resolution at Costco or Target for about the same price. Apple is missing the point here: People don’t want to do the same thing on a computer they can do with a DVD player (or a computer with a DVD player); they want something better. Like maybe HD resolution? That would be better, even if HD resolution is only available for streaming. Maybe Apple could have offered both – 640 x 480 for download, 1080p streamed. Now that would be interesting.

And downloadable games? It’s about time Apple opened up the iPod platform to mobile gaming, but, again, hardly something to throw a press conference for.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment is there were no Apple Core 2 Duo-based portables announced. PC makers are already shipping their notebooks with the new CPU. I thought the point of going to Intel was to keep pace with the Intel market?

Today was not a terrible showing for Apple, but not a great one, either. There’s nothing wrong with what the company introduced, but considering how quickly the technology market is moving forward, I had hoped to see more. There is no question that when Apple makes a product it’s the easiest-to-use. But as Apple has learned the hard way in the past, being the best isn’t always enough, you need to be first as well.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 12:43 pm and is filed under HOME, TECH, IPOD, PMP, PORTABLES, MAC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.