SFist Tech Roundup: Silence of the Blogs

Steve Jobs pulled up in his white, windowless van and made the announcement on Wednesday, complaining about how big and unwieldy the old iPods and iMacs were. (The whole presentation can be seen in its entirety on Apple's site if you've got the time and enjoy hearing the word "fantastic.") The response has been understandably nonplussed. A new iMac with a remote, a new iPod that plays video, and a new version of the iTunes Music Store that lets you download music videos and episodes of "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives." Big deal, if you look at it as three separate announcements.

So like everybody else, we're looking at the 2.3-inch screen and trying to see the bigger picture. We're at the figurative door, figuratively asking Jobs what happened to the missing iPod mini. And he's all, "Oh wait... was that a great big fat MP3 player?" And we point out that it wasn't all that big. But then he shows us the iPod nano anyway, which he acknowledges was announced just five weeks ago with a lot of hoopla and has been a huge critical and commercial success.

And we respond that that's the whole issue: you've just obsoleted a perfectly successful product line (the iPod mini) and gotten a lot of attention for it. So why would you come out just over a month later, risking over-exposure, to obsolete another succesful product line (the hard-drive based iPod) with a nice but unremarkable new version that just adds video to a screen that's still too small to watch it on? And then he panics and runs down to the basement to get his night-vision goggles.

Now, we should make one thing absolutely clear: we are not actually alleging that Steve Jobs intends to skin us to make an SFist Chuck suit. (Ed note: but we would totally buy one if Jobs chose to make one. Snazzy!) It's just a pained, over-extended metaphor to explain what could otherwise be seen as the actions of a crazy person. What we saw on Wednesday wasn't the full tucked-between-the-legs-and-posing-for-the-video-camera reveal. At the moment, we're still wandering around the basement hearing music and barking and calls for help and the distant sound of sewing machines.

The music is coming from the billions and billions of iPods that are being used and stolen on subways every day. The barking is the incessant yapping of companies like RealNetworks and Microsoft and TiVo and Verizon and Cingular and Viacom and Sony, all fighting for dominance in a market that's just not established yet — online and mobile video. The calls for help are coming from people trying to turn their computers into home media centers, incorporating their TVs and stereos with all their different video sources (legal and otherwise). And the iTunes Music Store is what Apple hopes will sew it all together. (We did warn that this was a pained metaphor.)

The "video iPod" isn't really the big deal. It's just an excuse to nano-fy the hard-drive based iPods into one consistent product line. Apple was careful to emphasize that the iPod is still "all about the music," with music videos as the bulk of their available content. A 3-minute video, a 30-second movie trailer, or a Pixar short — these are the things you can reasonably expect people to watch on a small screen. When it came time for the Disney/ABC announcement, Jobs was careful to show it in conjunction with the iTunes Music Store and the new iMac G5 running the new Front Row media center.

They're positioning themselves for convergence. First, establishing themselves as the distributors of downloadable content — making deals with Disney and, if the rumors have merit, NBC — to take over the market share there just like they have for downloadable music. Then, establishing themselves as software providers for home media, succeeding where Windows Home Media Cener and TiVo and Sony's attempts have failed.

And then, they'll go back to being hardware providers, when they release not an all-in-one computer-and-display machine like the iMac, but a Mac mini-like media center that integrates with your existing television and stereo. And along with it, a real mobile video player, with a horizontal orientation and a bigger screen. We in the Labs were initially skeptical that mobile video would ever be practical until we saw the Sony PSP; the screen is what sells it, and now we're using it all the time to watch downloaded episodes of TV shows on plane flights. But that device is a different market — it's a videogame machine, not an MP3 player — and it's hobbled by Sony's insistence on proprietary formats like the UMD and the low-capacity Memory Stick.

When Apple releases a device that has the iPod's form factor and hard drive capacity, with a screen big enough to watch a feature-length movie on, it'll be the PSP-killer. They've better-marketed the iPod as a general entertainment device, and now they've established real channels for getting content on the device — Sony's got its huge movie library, but people aren't scrambling to pay $15-$20 for movies on UMD. And in the interim until Apple releases this device, if people want to pay 2 bucks to download "Desperate Housewives" to their iPod and watch it on BART? Well, that's just lotion in the basket.

And while we're talking about handheld devices with bigger screens: while we were walking down the long dark hallway to talk to Apple, Palm shouted something profane and threw two new PDAs at us which got stuck in our hair.