So that grand little annual get together for Mac nerds has come and gone with some great little upgrades, a hella cool laptop, and some new things that you can do with your movies. While speculation is abound for what was the coolest and most interesting gadget to all, I would contend that the $20 dollar paid update for the iPod touch is worth more than it’s weight in gold.
Well, what does twenty dollars get you? Basically, an iPhone without the phone. Mail, Stocks, Weather, Notes, and Maps are all added to your iPod when you download the update and all of those goodies are added to the home screen. I have heard it already. “It’s a slap in the face of the early adopters.” Sure if you want to look at it that way you could, but it’s more nuanced than that. I would take some time and disassemble that raving post, but someone has already been kind enough to take care of that for me. In the many Apple related websites that I peruse on a regular basis (hey what do you want, I’m a geek), I have noticed a general malaise about the January Software Upgrade. Not surprisingly they have almost universally stated that if you want all of the features of an iPhone, just get a bloody iPhone. Normally I would be right on with this kind of supposition, but I happen to be one of the members of the target audience for the iPod touch. I know that I said in the past that the current iteration of the iPod touch is not one that I would be first in line at the store to purchase, but I miscalculated on a few points. One, that Apple would want to put out a mega-Pod replacement that would have the same amount of storage as the then current mid-range models, and two that the reason for said reluctance would be the transition from the hard-drive versions to the all flash lineup.
My initial internal speculations had what came to be known as the iPod touch as a hard-drive based model (they are pretty durable), sans wireless connectivity, and the now famous iPhone touchscreen interface. Clearly I was off on a few points and even made some grand gesticulations about the reasons that Apple shouldn’t do the things that they ended up doing (they mostly had to do with the aesthetic and the design choices behind the device). Obviously, this decision has worked to a certain extent, though one could argue the fact that Apple offered the upgrade to the iPod touch was due to disappointing sales numbers on that device and this was an effort to boost them. Since Apple isn’t kind enough to break down the sales numbers on their digital music players, we can only guess as to the reason. I would venture to say that it was more a combination of the fact that they saw a market for the phone-less iPhone or that there was a scramble to get in the most requested apps on the iPod before the Software Development Kit rolls out later this week. In the later respect, it is a case of “Well we know that someone is going to do it, we might as well show them how it’s done.” This is most especially true of the Maps application, which in addition to being ported over to the iPod, got a substantial upgrade.
Thus it whirls back to the crux of the argument that the phone-less iPhone is an item that anybody in the right mind would rationally desire. Those who are making this grand proclamation are making a whole series of incorrect assumptions:
All persons desiring a mobile phone with the functionality of the iPhone are willing to switch to AT&T. Along that same vein, AT&T service is super-happy-fun-time in all places in the United States (or abroad) Everybody can switch service providers (contracts through jobs etc.) Everyone who wants all of the features that an iPhone will grant you, wants a cell phone. Everyone lives in, America, Germany, France, and Great Britain*
Now I may be an old fashioned chicken who was just hatched yesterday, but there are a hell of a lot of people who don’t fit into that system of assumptions. Then there is a whole mess of people who don’t want an iPhone for some reason, but might be interest in the most advanced portable media player out there. I know that for me the cost of $20 was more than worth it for MobileMail alone. Everything else was just gravy. Not that I don’t like gravy, but when I was buying an iPod back in September, I wanted a portable music and video player, and I got was I think is the best portable video player on the market and aside from some initial trepidations about the size of the hard-drive, the best portable music player on the market and so did many. many other people.
*Not that Apple isn’t trying to break into other markets, like China and Japan, but hey it ain’t there quite yet.
