London - Apple CEO Steve Jobs tends to only announce new products once they hit the market. Even high-level employees at Apple are often clued in only a few days - or hours - ahead of Jobs’ famous keynote addresses.
Jobs made a rare exception for the recently high-publicity “It’s Showtime” event in San Francisco: he introduced a device that will only appear in the first quarter of 2007, but which may fundamentally change the interaction between the computer and the television.
The talk is about a box developed under the code name “iTV.” It’s not much larger than three CD cases stacked on top of one other, but can transmit content wirelessly from the Mac or Windows PC to the television: videos, music, photos or podcasts.
Steve Jobs oozed confidence that “iTV” will be a success: “It completes the overall picture.”
For Gene Muster, analyst for the financial service provider Piper Jaffray, Jobs did more than just announce a new product: “The big message ... is that Apple wants to take over the living room.”
The “iTV” box offers an HDMI port that can be used to control modern HD televisions. The box can also pass on video and audio signals to older televisions in analog form. “Apple is forging a path to a digital living room,” is how Tom Krazit, correspondent for US- based technology service CNET, reads between the lines of the Apple CEO’s announcement.
In other areas, Steve Jobs is sticking to the proven tactic of announcing products that are either immediately available in stores or that will be there in a few days.
In that tradition, Jobs presented a completely reworked palette of the successful iPod players: for starters, Apple is picking up on the style of the old iPod minis and bringing it to the iPod nano, including a coloured aluminium casing that is less susceptible to scratches then the black and white casings of the first generation of Nanos. For 249 dollars, Apple customers can buy a playback device with eight-gigabyte flash storage, twice as much as the prior model for a comparable price.
The high-end iPod offer 80 gigabytes and cost 379 dollars. The new iPod shuffle and its one gigabyte of memory is no bigger than a matchbook and weights only 14 grams. It costs 79 dollars. All new iPods have improved battery lives. They also allow pieces of music that belong together to be played without a gap between individual tracks, which makes listening to live concerts easier.
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