The iPhone 5 may have been the center of Apple's announcements yesterday, but the company also used the occasion to refresh the complete iPod line, showing an iPod touch that looks like the iPhone 5 and a completely redesigned iPod nano, as well as changes in both the iTunes application and Apple's music and movies store.
New iPod Nano, Touch Models
The new iPod seems to represent a renewed focus on music for the company. Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of iPhone and iPod product marketing, said the company has sold more than 350 million iPods. "We love music," he said.
Perhaps the biggest and most surprising change comes to the seventh generation of the iPod nano, which now has a 2.5-inch multi-touch display. This makes it notably longer than the existing iPod nano (I doubt you'll see many people trying to use the new model as a watch), but 38 percent thinner at only 5.4 mm. When I held it in my hand, it indeed seemed very thin and very easy to carry.
It has volume and forward/back buttons built in on the side and uses the new Lightning connector introduced with the iPhone 5. It has an FM tuner with live pause, and it now adds Bluetooth to wirelessly stream music. It continues to store photos and now offers widescreen video. It has pedometer and Nike+ fitness applications built right in. Despite the new features, Joswiak said it has the longest battery life of any nano, lasting up to 30 hours. It will be available in seven colors with background wallpaper that matches the exterior color. The nano will have 16GB of storage and will sell for $149.
The design of the fifth generation iPod touch unsurprisingly follows the iPhone 5 with the same 4-inch Retina display. It's even thinner and lighter, though, at only 6.1 mm thick and weighing 88 grams. The iPod touch now is getting the A5 processor (compared with the A4 used in the previous generation, producing what Joswiak said was up to seven times the graphics performance of the previous generation). Â
Joswiak said the iPod touch is not only the world's most popular music player, but also the world's most popular game player with 175,000 games and entertainment apps. A demo by Natural Motion Games showed a game due out this fall called Clumsy Ninja, which looks quite fun. It sustains 40 hours of music playback and up to eight hours of video.
The camera has been updated to a 5-megapixel iSight camera, with autofocus, flash, and some of the features from the iPhone including panorama shooting, shared photo streams, and iPhoto. It also has 1080p video recording and iMovie. It has a front-facing camera that seems to match that of the iPhone for FaceTime.
One very neat little feature is that it comes with a "touch loop," basically a strap that attaches to a little button that pops up and makes the device look more like a point-and-shoot camera.
It will now have more of the iPhone features, including all the Wi-Fi features of the iPhone 5 like 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11n networking and the ability to enable Airplay mirroring to Apple TV for the first time. Additionally, Siri will now be on the touch, as it will be powered by iOS 6.
The new iPod touch will be available in a 32GB version for $299 and a 64GB one for $399. It will come in five basic colors and Apple will also offer a (RED) version in Apple retail and online only; a portion of the proceeds go to fighting AIDS. Â
The older iPod touch will still be available with a 16GB version selling for $199 and a 32GB version will cost $249. The iPod shuffle will stick around in the same seven colors as the nano with a 2GB selling for $49.
iTunes Gets Updated on iOS, Windows, Mac
On iTunes, Eddy Cue, who heads Apple's Internet Software and Services, said Apple has sold more than 20 billion songs and the iTunes Store now has more than 435 million accounts enabled for 1-click purchasing. The iTunes Store is now growing from 20 countries to 63 countries and now more than two-thirds of downloads come from iOS devices.
Cue showed off a redesigned iTunes Store for iPad, integrating Facebook likes and adding the ability to preview music while browsing.
There's a new version of iTunes for Mac and Windows as well. A demo showed the new edge-to-edge display, with much more integration between a new view of your library and the store. It still has fairly standard views of your library in list form and your playlists, but I do like the ability to more easily drag and drop songs to playlists. A new "Up Next" feature is effectively a queue you can add to, rearrange, and see what songs are coming next. Searching and the mini-player also look much nicer, with search and Up Next now built into the mini-player.
Things like movies are now synchronized over iCloud so you can start a movie on the iPad and resume on iTunes on your Mac or PC. The iTunes Store will include concert information as well. The updates will be available in late October.
An Update on Apple's Other Products
Apple CEO Tim Cook started out the day by talking about Apple retail. He played a video of a great looking new store in Barcelonaâ€"an interesting choice as that city is the site of Mobile World Congress, a phone show Apple has traditionally been absent from. He said Apple now has 380 stores and is opening in its 13th country (Sweden) this week.
On the Macintosh, he talked about Mountain Lion, noting that seven million customers have upgraded. For the first time, Apple notebooks are now number one in U.S sales, with a 27 percent market share, catalyzed by higher growth rates than the PC for the past six years.
"The iPad is driving the post-PC revolution at a breathtaking pace," he said. More than 17 million iPads were sold in the second quarter, more than any PC manufacturer sold of their entire lineups. In total, iPad sales through June are 84 million, he said. Apple tablets had a 62 percent market share in the second quarter in 2011 and that grew to 68 percent in the second quarter of 2012. He also said iPad accounts for 91 percent of the tablet Web traffic. "I don't know what these other tablets are being used for," he added. (My guess is for reading books or watching movies.)
He said 94 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are evaluating iPads and many are developing custom applications for it. (He also said none of them are building apps for the PC, which is completely untrue. Enterprise developers are a huge part of the market.) There are now 700,000 apps in the App Store, 250,000 of which are designed for iPad. Ninety percent of all apps are downloaded at least once a month, Cook said, and the average customer has more than 100 apps. (He didn't recognize that most people don't use all their apps regularly, though.) Overall, he said Apple has sold 400 million iOS devices.
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