2004–01–07

The iPod mini and other Apple News

At yesterdays Macworld Apple announced a new smaller iPod: the iPod mini. Very nice looking but also very over priced. You get 4 gigs for $249 when you could just spend $300 and get the least expensive 15 gig ipod. No thanks. Sure, folks will buy it. But if they lowered it to $200 they’d probably sell gobs of these things. Apple says these are supposed to compete against the upper end mp3 players that are flash based. I think they’ve made a big mistake asking for that much money.

The other announcement I’ll mention is the updated iLife suite. Excellent. All of the apps have been updated and a new music making application has been introduced: GarageBand. I won’t go into the details of these updates or the new application because this info is easily browsed on the Apple website. I will say that I think this package is a fantastic deal at only $49, $29 with the educational discount. I will definitely splurge on it.

Okay, I lied. I will mention one thing. The updated iDVD has finally broken the 90 minute barrier and Apple says that it now encodes at a much higher quality, even if the project is at the limit of 2 hours. The previous version degraded after 60 minutes of video was added to the project and it’s very noticeable. Also, iDVD now has the ability to do chapters. Rock on Apple.