Apple’s New Music Toys

Yesterday, Apple live streamed its first event since 2002’s Macworld Keynote. It was ostensibly all about music, under a big banner of an acoustic guitar with a sound hole shaped like the Apple logo. You can watch it here, if you’d like, or just let us run you through the stuff worth caring about…

One technical aspect of this live stream was particularly interesting to music and tech geeks alike; It would be done using a streaming protocol Apple developed. The company is gearing up to open a massive $1 billion data center in North Carolina, one of the largest ever built. Apple clearly intends to start streaming a shit-ton of data. Was this week’s event going to announce a new streaming revolution? Subscription based on-demand music from the cloud? The successor to the MP3, blessed by the major labels, with revenue going to the artists?

Maybe someday. But not today.

Here’s what we did get:

Ping, a “social network” built into the new iTunes. We’ve been checking it out, and while the many subtle organizational improvements in iTunes 10 are very welcome, Ping version 1.0 is, for the most part, useless. You can make friends, and that’s about it. It seems like it’d be a no-brainer to expect iTunes to share what you’re listening to or rating in your library with your friends through the built-in Ping, but no such luck. You simply can’t (not automatically nor manually) share anything from your music library, in fact. All you can do is “like” music, and even then, you have to go into the iTunes store to find it first. And that’s if the iTunes store even carries it. It’s no Facebook killer, no MySpace killer… Not even a Lala killer, in a fair fight.

What’s simultaneously frustrating and encouraging is that “featured” members (artists, for the most part) are sharing their asses off. Taylor Swift has posted photos, videos, status updates, the works. It’s probably just a matter of time before Apple works out scaling issues and rolls those enhanced features out to everyone. It’s got a long way to go though, and while it could someday become the classiest way for bands of all shapes and sizes to share music with their fans, it could also wind up resting in the same plot as Google Wave, or Apple’s carpal tunnel destroying hockey puck mouse.

Look us up, though. I can be found as Kevin Cogill (because that’s my name), and Johnny Firecloud’s on there too. Let’s see where it goes.

New iPods. They’re smaller. They’re thinner. They’re new and they play music. Your old iPod is now large and fat and old and useless.

They put the button back on the iPod Shuffle because seriously, did you see the last version? They had removed all the buttons. You don’t need ‘em. You just talk to your iPod, and tell it what to do. Want to see your playlists? Ask your iPod, and it will audibly read through them. Awesome right? Actually, really fucking stupid. And Apple knows it, because the 4th generation iPod Shuffle is just the 2nd generation iPod Shuffle but smaller. They hit the undo button on the weird talking stick.

The new iPod Nano is being called the iWatch by some. It’s about the size of those old school Casio calculator watches, and it’s got a tiny little touch screen. You could wear it on your wrist, but you’d get beat up, and rightfully so. Also, they got rid of the camera, because apparently it’s really important to Apple that things constantly get smaller and thinner, even if it means ditching key features while not lowering the price at all.

The iPod Touch, also known as the iPhone without the phone (which basically makes it the iPhone on AT&T), is thinner, has the really truly beautiful retina display debuted with the iPhone 4, and dual cameras for FaceTime video calls and 720p HD video recording. What’s really odd though is that while the iPod Touch can take still pictures, they’re only 960 x 720. That’s 3/5th of 1 megapixel. Seriously.

New Apple TV. While the Apple TV is a little outside of our usual scope of strictly music related subjects, it’s the most impressive new offering to come this week. For $99, this little (as in way, way smaller than the previous model) box will act as a hub for all the media stored on all of the Macs, iPads, iPhones and iPods lying around your house. You can stream any media from any of your devices right into it via AirPlay (formally AirTunes).

There’s no hard drive in the Apple TV; It’s really just nothing more than a way to send streaming content into your TV (albeit at 720p) through its simple HDMI connector. But for $99, that’s not a bad proposition. And while we don’t have subscription based streaming music yet, with the Apple TV, you can stream TV shows commercial free at $1 per pop. Is it better than cable? Not until you can pay a flat fee to get everything. But it’s a step forward.

Personally, I picked up one of Apple’s newest Mac Minis awhile back to use as a media center, which blows the Apple TV out of the water. Sure, it ran me over $700, but it has a hard drive (and USB ports for external drives), a DVD burner, and a powerful Intel Core 2 Duo processor. While it can do on-demand streaming through iTunes just like the Apple TV, Install Boxee (or Plex, or VLC for that matter) and it can play anything you throw at it; not just what you bought from the iTunes store, or encoded to an iDevice-friendly format. In the long run, it’s still a much better investment. The Apple TV doesn’t even run a web browser, let alone iOS apps.

Oh, and… We got An All New Chord by Chris Martin. That’s a G. Nice try though, dude.