Apple’s New iPod Lineup
Sep 5th, 2007 | By James Lewin | Category: Audio Podcasting, Digital Music, iPhone, iPods & Portable Media Players, Video Podcasts 
Apple CEO Steve Jobs today announced Apple’s new lineup of iPods at an event at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
Here are the highlights:
- The iPod shuffle appears to be on life-support. It got new colors.
- The iPod nano got a bigger screen, video capabilities and an interface update.
- Big iPods are now iPod classics, getting a new UI and hard drive capacity up to 160GB. This looks like the one to get if you’re a fan of Internet video.
- The most anticipated introduction, the iPod touch, brings the iPhone touchscreen interface to the iPod line. It’s basically an iPhone without the phone capabilities, with 8GB and 16GB capacities.
- The price on the iPhone was cut to $399, and the 4GB version was dropped. The iPhone is a success, but not the runaway success that Apple expected. Slashing the price by over 30% should bring it to a price range that’s palatable to a larger audience.
- Jobs also introduced the iTunes WiFi music store, which will allow users to browse and purchase songs via wireless connections. Purchased tracks are copied back to your computer at next sync.
- Apple’s podcast directory has hit a milestone of 125,000 podcasts, 25,000 of which are video podcasts.
While the new iPods aren’t especially surprising, Jobs introduced an extremely strong lineup that should solidify Apple’s position in the portable media player space, strengthen Apple’s venture into smart phone territory and reinforce Apple’s iTunes as the de facto standard for portable Internet media.
Just a small correction: Apple predicted that they would sell 1 million iPhones in the first quarter (that would be July, August and September 2007). Today they announced they were on track to sell the 1 million’s iPhone before the end of September. Exactly how, then, is that “… not the runaway success that Apple expected.”
Any logical reading would be that the iPhone is exactly the success that Apple expected.
Philip
[…] As I said, Reinier and I were in the Apple Store Regen Street yesterday, mainly to have a look at the Apple Store, but also to have a look at the new iPods. Apple announced a complete update to their iPod lineup last week, most notably replacing the iPod Nano with a new smaller version and introducing a new iPod Touch that is based on the iPhone interface. […]