As anyone who cares about Apple stuff probably already knows, Apple “announced some new stuff”:http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/09/12/showtime/index.php today. Lots of “meh” items, but a few noteworthy ones.
* iTunes videos are now 640×480. That’s pretty good, almost DVD. Makes the value proposition much better, and the quality will be very comparable with torrent-able HDTV recordings. Where is the better quality audio downloads though? I mean if you’re willing to stream multiple-hundred-of-megabytes movies, why can’t you offer lossless or at least 256kbps songs?
* You can finally suck stuff off your iPod without using “Senuti”:http://fadingred.org/senuti/. Not earth shattering, but convenient. I fear that synching two libraries on different machines will still be a tedious manual process, though.
* Multiple library support in iTunes. This might have been nice before I decided on buying a desktop.
* “iTV”, prototype wireless box that you’ll be able to stream movies to. Sounds good but also like even more lock in.
Apple, where is the subscription service? I’ve been trying out Rhapsody recently, and it totally kicks ass. Sure the players aren’t as nice, or software UI isn’t as nice either, but being able to access the entire catalog provides immense value that outweighs those negatives.
I don’t really understand the argument that you don’t ‘own’ the music. Maybe it’s just irrelevant to me. I tend to buy CD’s, listen to them a few times, and then never listen to them again except for a few tracks. I probably listen to a lot more radio than I do CD’s. It seems like if you’re willing to pay many 10’s of dollars for cable per month, paying 10 for music isn’t such a bad deal. I get way more value out of being able to listen as much as I want out of an entire catalog than from being able to buy a CD once a month. Who cares if I don’t _own_ the current hit CD a year from now. It’s very unlikely that I’ll listen to it, and with this service, I’ll have the option of both listening to the old one and next year’s hits altogether.
And also with Fairplay DRM, it’s not really like you _own_ the music anyways. The vast vast majority of my iTunes database is songs that I imported myself. And now that I think about it, I somewhat regret not importing them as MP3, because MP3 lets me use them in any player that I choose, instead of the very few ones that support AAC. With iTunes and Fairplay, you’re still stuck with 128kbps songs that you can’t play everywhere and that you can’t share. That’s probably why I’ve only bought like maybe 20 tracks.
I think today’s announcement really reinforced the idea that the software features a huge part of the value of the iTunes/iPod value proposition, rather than the service model or the content. Apple’s pretty good at making a good software experience, but it looks like most of the things they _improved_ this time are things that customers have been asking for for awhile, and the real important ones (to me at least) are the ones that improve the service. Apple still definitely leads the space in terms of the software, but do they lead it in terms of service? With Rhapsody having 2 million tracks, it’s hard to say anymore. All I can say is I hardly used iTunes at work, but I’ve been using Rhapsody every day.
Also, one really minor intersting marketing thing: Apple claims they have 88% of all the US legal downloads market. Does this conveniently not include subscription services? It’s obvious that if all you’re gonna do is download tracks for purchase, then you’d go with iTunes. None of the other services come close. But the interesting competition isn’t coming from other for-download stores, so that number is interestingly misleading, IMHO.