“The Apple rumor mill has been hard at work lately, with plenty of folks prognosticating about what exactly Steve Jobs would announce today in the company’s ‘It’s Showtime’ event. I found the actual announcements mostly underwhelming, with some potential bright spots on the horizon,” Alyce Lomax writes for The Motley Fool.
“First off, there’s a whole slew of new iPods at new price points, with increased storage capacity. For example, the newest high-end iPod will have 80 gigabytes of memory for $349. New iPod-ready video games like Tetris, Pac-Man, and Bejeweled, available through iTunes, are kind of nice, but certainly nothing earth-shattering,” Lomax writes.
Lomax writes, “While Apple did make good on digital movie downloads, it hasn’t gone the whole nine yards. Its first offerings are only from Disney (NYSE: DIS) and subsidiaries Pixar, Touchstone, and Miramax — a no-brainer considering Jobs’ Disney connection. The iTunes offerings also address one of the major hurdles in digital film downloading: price. New releases will sell for $12.99 when preordered or purchased in the week following the release of the digital and DVD versions, and $14.99 thereafter. (Older titles will sell for $9.99.) Those prices seem more reasonable than the fees charged by other nascent digital movie offerings like CinemaNow and Movielink.”
“Jobs previewed iTV, a device that will allow people to wirelessly view movies and TV shows they’ve downloaded to their Macs and PCs on their TVs. That device, expected to retail for $299, is probably the most exciting part of the announcement, but alas, iTV won’t be available until the first quarter of 2007. Meanwhile, one of the longest running Apple iPod rumors of all time — the mythical cell phone/iPod hybrid — remained a no-show,” Lomax writes. “Apple needed to impress today, and I’m not quite sure it did.”
Full article here.
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