The Beatles On iTunes: Why Apple May Have It Wrong.
The moment of truth came to all of us at 10:00 AM EST on the Apple website about the big and unforgettable event happening for iTunes. We were all ready for live streaming, 1080p video downloads, and anything else that Apple could surprise us with. The big moment came with everybody refreshing their pages like there was not going to be a tomorrow and that’s when we all saw it in big bold letters across the screen. “The Beatles. Now On iTunes.”
Now what is strange is that many of us have wanted this for years now and now that it is here, well, we just don’t really see the excitement. We saw this coming to be quite frank. And honestly, we were just expecting something a whole lot more exciting then just The Beatles. Yes, just The Beatles. No Live Streaming services, no 1080p, not even the release of iOS 4.2 for iPad which we were expecting in October. Now, to be fair, The Beatles albums all have bonus content provided by iTunes Extras, you can buy the complete iTunes Box Set (as if you don’t have it already), and you can now get every album they made in one place to complete your collection. But the main problem with this is that the people who would want a full and completed Beatles collection most likely already have a full and completed Beatles collection. It’s not like The Beatles have been lost for several years, missed the age of CD’s and now are suddenly only available on iTunes for the world to be amazed by. The Beatles came to CD’s, we all bought the CD’s, and we ripped them to our computers and listened to them on our iPods for 9 years while we waited for Apple to do something about it.
Don’t get us all wrong Apple. We love the fact that you were able to get The Beatles onto iTunes for downloads by future generations. We really do. It’s just that we wanted something “unforgettable” to happen to iTunes. Kind of the way when you brought the iTunes Store to iTunes in 2003. That was unforgettable and we still are benefitting from that now. Or the App Store in 2008. It was the opening of a whole new market for developers and a whole new market for iPhone users to buy personalized applications specifically for their iPhone. We wanted something unforgettable like that but instead you end up making us all look at your addition of The Beatles music almost the same way we would look at another artists new set of albums. It just isn’t good enough to be called unforgettable. Hopefully you guys can just appreciate what whole new market The Beatles have opened for Apple and hopefully you guys at Apple can appreciate how this is not what we expected to be the unforgettable news. Next time you have something along the lines of this planned, just call it “Hey, You Might Like What We Have To Show You Tomorrow.”
Verizon iPad Commercial Hits The Air
I was never one for bragging but when Verizon has one of the most popular tablet computing devices in the world in their stores, who could blame them for getting a bit of a big head. Whether you heard it on YouTube or saw the commercial on the air with your own eyes, it is now official, Verizon has introduced their very own iPad commercial. Now this may seem a little bit weird since it isn’t really that Verizon has the iPad but they are just selling it at their store with a Mi-Fi add-on. And since the fact AT&T isn’t being brought in on some of this great iPad advertising is a bit strange. You would think that because they have their 3G cards built into the iPad that AT&T would be showing ads for one of the hottest products on the market today. But this isn’t much of a surprise either. In the beginning people could pay $30 a month and their iPad would send them every bit of data that they wanted from the Internet. Because of challenges and other physical limits, AT&T pulled that a few months after the iPad went on sale. The current offerings for AT&T’s iPad data plans are 500MB for $15 and 1GB for $25. Verizon is in fact offering 4GB more on their $30 than AT&T elected to. So that may just be why AT&T is afraid to show us the numbers we would get. More bars in more places with way less data than ever.
And this ad could really be a sign of things to come for the iPad and iPhone. What if not only this ad was to get people comfortable with the idea of Verizon in their Apple iPad’s life but in their Apple lifestyle all together? The several “confirmed” rumors of Verizon iPhones hitting the streets sometime within the next few months has become more and more of a liable concept. At first in the beginning it seemed as though Verizon would never enter the Apple world and that AT&T and Verizon would be the one difference that people would even give a second thought to buying an Apple product. Now it seems that barrier is going to come down rather quickly once Big Red will swoop in and rescue most people suffering from dropped calls and slow data connections a sigh of fresh air. One can only hope that this advertisement, greatly resembling both Apple’s customary style and Verizon’s fresh look, is the window of things to come and opportunities to arrive.
New Apple Products: iMacs, Displays, and Trackpads
Last night Apple’s site went down temporarily but came back bearing brand new toys for all you geeks. The first is a new iMac upgrade. Now incorporating Intel’s brand new i3, i5, and i7 Core Processors at speeds up to 2.93 GHz on a Quad Core chip in the 27” model. Overall this was not the full upgrade that we might had hoped for. There were no Blu-Ray drives added, no USB 3.0, no AMOLED technologies, and no multi-touch technologies into the screen or OS.
However, the one part about multi-touch is only half true. Even though it was not incorporated into the OS, it was included into a piece of hardware that is now an option to get with your new desktop machine. It’s called the Magic TrackPad, much like the ever famous Magic Mouse which was Apple’s way of trying to incorporate multi-touch into their systems. For the most part, it’s pretty much no different then if you ripped out the trackpad from your Macbook and put it on a keyboard with no keys. In my opinion, for some applications it has true potential but for the most part it would seem rather inconvenient for full time use when you could have much more full control using an actual scrolling mouse. Only time will tell and applications will just have to evolve.
You can truly never have enough AA Batteries and Apple has finally agreed with their own line of rechargeable batteries. Even though they would mainly be designed for their cordless mice, keyboards, and their Magic TrackPads, they could definitely be expected to work more then well for many other non-Apple gadgets. But it is truly odd in a way for Apple to be designing batteries that wouldn’t be built-in unlike their batteries for their unibody Macbooks. They would last much longer then the typical AA batteries and would make the product even smaller. But people just may need a bit longer to get that idea into their heads.
And finally, the rumors of Apple announcing the comings of the 27” LED Cinema Display have turned out to be true. Apple put up on their website that they will be creating the 27” LED screen to match their 27” iMac computer in their line-up. It will of course have the same connectivity as the old display for power and peripherals including the camera and built-in speakers. Models will start arriving in stores starting September.
That’s all the updates that Apple had to offer today. Be sure to head down to your local Apple Store to check it all out and be on the look out for other Apple products in the possible future (hint hint, there could be a possible iLife ’11 coming out August 7th according to a few rumors.)
UPDATE: The Mac Pro was also updated with 12 core processors across the board. You can have configurations of a 6-core Mac Pro at 3.33GHz, an 8-core system at 2.4GHz, or a 12-core system at up to 2.93GHz. Apple also raised the storage capacities to 8TB across 4 hard drives and 512GB of solid-state drives for high end use. Apple also raised the graphics processing with the new ATI Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB of GDDR5 memory for high speed performance. The models will be shipping in August.
