As much as I don't really have a need and can't really afford anything Apple ever announces at their press conferences, it doesn't stop me from feeling like I'm going to die if I don't have something they just showed off. I guess that's really why they do the press events and if I'm any indication, they work.
They announced a refresh of the entire iPod lineup except for the Classic. The shuffle is going back to be a square and it's going to have buttons on it again. I know a couple of people that bought their kids the last shuffle that had buttons on the headphone line and they weren't too excited about it. The iPod Nano is probably the biggest change. They made it just a little bit bigger than the shuffle and made it touch screen. From all that I can tell, they've dropped video playback from the nano and decided that that's going to be a iPod Touch level feature. The new nano looks pretty cool but I really think Apple's trying to use it as a gateway to get people buying the more expensive Touch. They added front and rear cameras to the Touch and gave it the same high-resolution screen as the iPhone 4. What the Touch really represents is the iPod that keeps on giving. With iTunes and the App Store built in to it, revenue doesn't really stop with the sale of the Touch. They keep making money throughout the life of the device and I think Apple's realized that the more people they sell a Touch to, the more apps they're going to sell, the more music, the more videos, etc...
Finally, they showed off a revamped Apple TV. The Apple TV has never been a huge product for them but I think this version has more potential. There's no local storage on the device, it's based around streaming content from other sources. Netflix is there as well as the ability to get media off of the computers on your local network. What Apple is betting on though is iTunes rentals. Movies seem a little steep to me. $4.99 for a movie rental that is day-and-date released with the DVD. If they wanted to drive movie rentals to this thing, they should have tried the Netflix model. $7.99/month for unlimited streaming for movies would probably be huge. Unfortunately that's not the route they took. TV show rentals are going to be $0.99 per episode. I actually don't think this is all that bad. They're HD if you have the internet connection for it and they're commercial free which is more than you can say for Hulu. So if you were to rent an entire season of a show, it'd be around $25. If they offered season discounts, I think they'd have a huge win. A season for $20 would be about $0.80/episode. A decent discount.
To me, the more Apple tries to make the Apple TV work the more they prove that as time goes on we're going to be consuming entertainment in more and more different ways. I believe that traditional TV subscription models are coming to an end and we're going to see the emergence of more online type entertainment consumption. It's going to be a few years before it really starts taking hold and faster broadband speeds are going to have to become more standard, but I really think that TV over the internet has a lot to offer, mainly in giving consumers more control over what they're paying for and what they're watching. There's a lot of potential and a lot of questions still left unanswered. It's products like the Apple TV though that are going to push the issue and it's companies like Apple that are trying to answer the questions that are going to be successful in the long run.
--Paul
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