It's that time of year for new iPods. Quite a few rumors surrounding this event regarding a new Apple TV, new form factor for the Nano, and an iPhone 4 like iPod Touch. And for the first time since 2002, Apple is live streaming the event. Popular theories on why range from Apple wanting to test out their new datacenter, to this being a way of dealing with the MiFi WiFi problem from the previous event.

For anyone on OS X 10.6, or an iPhone/iPad/iPod touch, the stream will be available at apple.com at 10AM PDT. People on other platforms are out of luck for this one, unless you have a program handy to work with the IETF draft for HTTP live streaming. Apple has a test stream here.

Well on my macbook that test link works with Safari. No go with Firefox 4 beta and the latest version for Chrome.

I wonder what those of us with the older AppleTV will get? I'm guessing a goodbye and thanks for your support.

I'm still trying to figure out why it's better to deny flash, while there's a majority of people out here that can't watch this. Apple really would rather I sit here watching a slow-moving stream of text and photos than watch their slick video presentation?


That's exactly what I assumed until I realized that I wouldn't be able to watch it. Given the number of people who can't, I highly doubt that there will be any fewer press people with MiFis in the audience.

For all of you disenfranchised (like me), I find the best live blogging coverage is at GDGT.

*edit*
I'm fairly close to a decent viewing experience by watching the GDGT stream, while watching/listening to TWiT.

Flash wouldn't help here. It would actually make it worse, since it requires custom backend for live streaming. Apple is simply pushing out files, and Akamai is simply serving HTTP requests. It scales well, since Akamai is already set up to host tons of HTTP content. Apple published the standard with an industry recognized standards body, not their fault other companies haven't chosen to implement it.

You can see Akamai's stats for streaming here:
http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz3.html

It's shot up like crazy since the event started.

I'll hold back any feedback till it's over though, still plenty to go.

No, but it's their fault for using it if nobody has adopted it. At the very least, they have nothing to complain about if there's still dozens of MiFis in the room.

No matter, I think I like listening to TWiT more anyway. That way I'm getting decent commentary, instead of listening to Steve being his usual smug self, and then hearing a room full of press people applauding (which always bugs the hell out of me).

Well, to be quite honest and blunt, why would Apple want to spend more money on using someone else's technology to stream an event to someone like yourself, who continues to bag on Apple all the time about how smug they are and isn't likely to buy any of their products anyhow? I can't even imagine how much money Apple is spending already to stream this. Add in the overhead for doing Flash based RTSP streaming (that works poorly behind corporate firewalls) and that cost would skyrocket.

I was wrong about one thing, Adobe does also support HTTP streaming with Flash. http://www.adobe.com/products/httpdynamicstreaming/ No idea how open their implementation is though. Adobe says open, but I can't find a spec sheet for it with the IETF or a similar group.

They really only care about people that drink their kool-aid, so why pander to different audiences? I was interested in watching but lost interest when I discovered my modern browser can't play it.

I've noticed Steve doesn't use the word "are" - everything seems to be "is" - awkward.

So far everything is as expected and rumored. He's spending WAY too much time on the social features of iTunes, called "Ping." We get it, it's all been done before, it's called Last.FM.

I'd like to know if they've re-written iTunes to be faster. Gotten rid of any of the BS behavior it has or made any improvements to allow it to work with non-music media without UI elements that refer to music-specific properties.

Maybe they have another app. That would be nice, because iTunes for anything other than music is kind of ultra-crap.

Because I don't represent all the people who can't watch this. Are you saying that there are no Windows users out there who use iPods and want to watch this event? I'd bet there are.

As for the event its self, all the updates look good, especially the nano, which is a really nice form factor.

I'm not hot on Ping.

The Live broadcast cut out and went back to people arriving at the event just as Steve was starting his recap.

Apple TV at $99 sounds nice at first, but I suspect it's about $60 too expensive if it's missing what I think it's missing...

Namely 1080p playback and the ability to play back all codec and wrapper formats.

I think $4.99 for a 24 hour movie rental is way too expensive as well, but I'm sure the device will still sell relatively well. IMO, renting should get you at LEAST 48 hours, preferably 36, regardless of price.

Being able to hand off playback from an iOS device is somewhat nice, but not as nice as being able to hand off in the other direction. Imagine - watching something on the TV and going to the can/bed while continuing to watch on your iPad.

Specs are up on Apple.com. A4 chip powered. 720p max. No DTS sound at all, no AC3 decoding capabilities, H.264 only, using only mp4, m4v and mov container formats. I only rip to MKV (H.264) and direct MPEG2 ISO files.

Sorry, I would't use this thing if I could get the box for free.

I think the analogy of Leo on TWiT was pretty good: they hit a single, double, triple, and then they fouled out.

The shuffle is okay (and it's hilarious that Steve allowed buttons to be added). The nano, I think, is the highlight with a fantastic form factor. The Touch is not only just what they needed to do, but more than I expected. The Touch used to be the iPhone without the phone and several important features. Now it is exactly the iPhone without the phone.

The AppleTV and iTunes were a little underwhelming. I do not like Ping, and don't think it will be a successful network. Not only is it a walled garden, which is bad for a social network, but you have to have a piece of software installed to even look at it. I don't have to be a member of Twitter to view its content, but I have to download, install, and sign up for iTunes to view its content.

The AppleTV update was very minor. The most important part of it was the price drop, frankly. They didn't add anything at all that many other devices didn't already have for over a year now (everything has Netflix in it now, and I disagree with Steve that this is the best implementation of it). Essentially it's a Roku box, but Roku has a great deal of content that AppleTV won't have.

I'd also love to know if Apple did indeed plan to name the AppleTV iTV, but it looks like they didn't get to take that name. That's a first. It looks like Ping.fm might be pretty pissed off, though

I also think the coolest thing shown was the iPod Nano. Too bad they don't have a 32GB model. And too bad the music playing software still looks like it sucks, like on all the other iPods.

This unit is more like an iPod Pico, and at the risk of cluttering up their product line and price points, they really could have released a new iPod Mini that would have been the size of the old Nano's screen, all touch, WITH a camera on the back. That would have maintained the extra display real-estate and camera of the old Nano in the new product line. This new Nano is very cool, but it really appeals to different use desires than the old one. It's like a Shuffle with a screen, I'm sure people are really going to miss the camera and larger display.



I can't think of anything that was added to the iPod to match the iPhone other than a camera. It's still missing an ear-level speaker and GPS.

Obviously it took the new parts of the iPhone 4 like the front camera and retina display, but I'm saying that it didn't really get anything added to this generation other than the camera, to bring it any closer to the iPhone 4 than the previous generation to the iPhone 3Gs.

Well, the old AppleTV couldn't play any variety of formats at all. Just one kind, pretty much. I'm very disappointed that the press is giving a pass on not having 1080p. All the podcasts I've listened to are saying it's no big deal and that 720p is good enough. I know it's good enough, but 1080p is a standard now, most of the TVs today are capable of it, and not even supporting it is a cop-out. I know it would use a lot of bandwidth, making it hard to stream, but that's no excuse to not let the hardware even support it for the future. It makes me wonder if the hardware could even support it, given how underpowered the old AppleTV was. They didn't mention what the innards were. I wonder if it's the A4 or not...


Yeah, I think $4.99 is still a little pricey. $3.99 would be really good, $2.99 would see me preordering an AppleTV today...


You're right! Oops!

Maybe I'm the only one but I wish the iTouch would come out with an internal GPS.

Here's the real-world implication of the lack-lustre Apple TV.

Someone already using some other misc streaming device, no matter how crappy it is, isn't going to be able to play back their (small, medium, HUGE) file-based video collection from their computer(s) when they pick up a new Apple TV.

From the document itself, paraphrasing what the term "Internet-Draft" means:

The idea that 720p is "good enough" for a set-top media player released in late 2010 is preposterous. It looks to me like they crippled it to bring the price point down, driving sales up, and creating more demand for the 1080p version they'll release in six months or so. That's the only way I can see them competing with Boxee Box, Google TV and friends when they're on 1080p with a lot more content options.

I concur with the sentiment that all the iPods are nice, but as someone who's in the market to buy a HTPC type box in the near future, I was hoping for something decent from Apple, if only to put pressure on the Boxee Box and Google TV guys. This ain't it, and makes me wonder how they managed to screw up this product line yet again.

The Apple TV is a movie and TV rental box. That's it. 1080p is too bandwidth intensive for them to stream in high quality. I suspect it's also too much for the A4 chip to handle since it doesn't have silicon dedicated to that task.

Apple will compete and do so well because of their market presence and brand. I will buy a Boxee Box when it comes out, but even with my sale, I'd be surprised if they could pull off even 5% of Apple's sales. Google might fare better, but I don't have high hopes for them either in this market.

I think Apple is going to move a lot more boxes than they did with the previous generations. I don't know if they've done enough to jump it out of Hobby class though.


And back to the iPod... Everyone wishes that the iPod touch had a GPS. Well, everyone except TomTom and Garmin of course. Apple might not have wanted to dedicate any internal space for the AGPS receiver, or it might strictly be based on iPhone differentiation.

This thing is, at the very least, going to put a huge dent in the sales of pocket HD video recorders. Nice to be able to send the video over WiFi so you can then clean out your flash and record more video.

Google's box will be more confusing to the average consumer, and that will hurt it. But they've already said they'll have apps, which is what everyone was hoping the AppleTV would have, and that might get it as many sales as the AppleTV. I agree that the Boxee Box will not sell nearly as many as either of these companies.


There are only two reasons they'll sell more than they did before: lower price for the box, and lower price for TV shows. Lower prices for movies would have helped a lot. Netflix is probably already on something else a person buying an AppleTV has, since Netflix is already on about 337 different devices.



My guess for why there's no GPS is because Apple doesn't want people using the Touch as a nav system because without a cellular data connection, there's no way to get map data. It would probably be harder to cache all the map data an user would want than to just not let the user do GPS.


One question about the Touch's camera: am I wrong, or did I hear correctly that it's not as good quality as the iPhone's camera? I think it's lower res...

No quality GPS application downloads data over a data connection. That's only what bottom of the barrel monthly-plan crap-ware carrier-branded software does. There are probably more than 3 or 4 very good GPS apps iOS that include the data with their downloads and regularly update the software and data through the store. TomTom, Navigon and CoPilot are the three names that I already know quite well.



You overestimate how big map data is. It's small - all things considered.



You're right. It's just over 0.5 Megapixels. Or just under SVGA or just over VGA, however you want to refer to it. I just say it's useless for stills.

It also doesn't have an LED flash nor can you manually focus (tap or otherwise) it seems in video or still mode. Its still photos will in fact only be ever so slightly larger than your actual display, 960x720. UGH. What is that, like 1997 Digicam levels?

The only advantages over the iPhone:

Much smaller and lighter
Available with up to 64GB (actually 59GB)
Doesn't cost $800

I'd love an iPhone and I'd be willing to forego the first two, but that last one is a real stickler.

I'm not saying that. There are likely plenty of people in Windows land, or even Linux land, Android land or whatever that want to watch it. And there isn't a solution that would work for 100% of the people. If this was the only way to get the information, I'm sure Apple would have put much more effort into making sure it could be seen. But it wasn't the only way. Thousands of bloggers around the world are busy writing up articles and posting them. Hundreds of news organizations are doing the same. And of course even Apple was busy creating new content for Apple.com detailing everything talked about. Part of that will even be a standards based H.264 file download of the entire event.

Always remember Apple is a very focused and streamlined company. They are going to do the minimum amount of effort for the most amount of impact, instead of trying to cover every possibility along the way. They will also always use their own technology above any other, just like many other companies. Last I checked, Microsoft still only offers streams of their events in wither Windows Media formats meant to be streamed to IE and Windows Media, or more recently to Silverlight platforms. That doesn't cover 100% either. And nor does Flash.

As for the repeated smug and koolaid comments, well, clearly nothing said in the past has really altered anyones opinions here even with engineers of the company explaining the situation. Guess I should start calling Google people smug for being happy with what works for them, and koolaid drinkers for being excited about Android and GMail and Chrome OS and whatever new thing comes from them.

I'll go through the rest of the event later to figure out what was actually announced. Been a busy day at the office, and was pulled away right around the time iTunes 10 was announced. I'm guessing it's not a major rewrite like I was hoping for from what I saw so far.

Oh, I'll say something else positive about the AppleTV. Its price point, regardless of its capabilities, is probably going to cause a ripple effect in the industry.

Though I've been hoping for a long time that its UI would do the same, so far everyone else sees fit to ship next to unusable interfaces.

Why? The AppleTV interface is really no different than half the other players out there. They all follow the main menus along one axis and then sub-menus along the other.

What?

I'm not talking about Boxee here, but rather people like ViewSonic, Netgear and even WD.

Most companies don't show their UI at all on their web sites or press materials. That's a huge alarm because it means that the UI was designed and implemented by the same guy who's responsible for collecting the open source code and the code given to them by the SoC vendor and glueing it together. It means the UI is going to be pretty crap.

The Apple TV UI has issues, but it also has a lot of strengths, and it is most certainly not crap in the same sense as the test-based, file-browsing pieces of crap I see most everywhere else. There's a good amount of graphics flare and multiple ways to browse your collection, plus of course cover art and meta data - something most other boxes don't have at all.

For Photos, its slideshow looks really great and so far its library selection still also looks better than everyone else's. No else one has done photos at a level even close to "fair" let alone something very usable. Even Boxee's photo UI sucks very badly. Frankly, I'd rather Boxee not support photos at all than keep the UI they have in there now.

Sorry, I think we're just talking about different aspects of the UI. When you say "so far everyone else sees fit to ship next to unusable interfaces," I take that to mean the actual method with which you navigate around the interface. I wouldn't say that Apple's wasn't more attractive than most of the boxes out there (it is), but overall Boxee is FAR more attractive than Apple's very plain, boring UI.

And I stand behind my statement that the actual navigation is no different than half of the other boxes. You select your activity on one axis, then drill down into that activity on the other to pick what you want to do. In fact, after that, it's really not that different from the iPod media player from a navigation standpoint, which I thought you hated.

One point I definitely won't argue on is that Apple made the best slideshow device I've ever used. I love how it displays photos, although the "Ken Burns Effect" occasionally cuts off people's heads I'm not kidding when I say my #1 favorite thing about the AppleTV is the screensaver. My dad and I used to sit there listening to music and watching the photos scroll by. It was so fun to pick out photos to comment on. Fantastic.


It's funny. For the longest time, the UI clearly emphasized Apple's content over your personal collection. The very first item in all the top-level menus was always for iTunes store content (browsing movies and music to purchase). But recently with the last update, I think they actually made your own content the top item. Now this new box is clearly focused on Apple's content again. Oh well.

Apart from Boxee, AppleTV and very recently perhaps the new PopBox, there isn't a device out there with a usable UI. That means method of navigation, what it shows you when you navigate, how easy it is to find your media, etc. As a whole, the UIs look terrible, don't offer you any usable information besides maybe a filename, including extension, and have really really (REALLY) bad performance.

The WD box has some attention to the UI, but it's still really just about files and doesn't know anything about the media nor metadata. Apart from the devices I've just mentioned, no one else is at all concerned about UI nor what gets displayed on the screen apart from perhaps being able to decode the video files. Even simply pausing or skipping around though a file is a painful experience on most boxes. Unfortunately Boxee still doesn't have this right either, since in their current beta it still freezes up the video if you skip more than twice in succession. The BEST for this is SageTV, bar none. Three sets of forward skip, three sets of backward skip. You can change the amount of seconds/time for any of them.

Catching back up to all the news today (and apologies for the snarky attitude earlier towards the smug and koolaid references, while they do get old, i've just been in a really weird mood this week with work).

Buttons back on the Shuffle was a good move. It does show Apple pays attention to the sales numbers closely, and is willing to reverse course when needed.

The new Nano seems interesting, but odd new touch gestures there to navigate it. Will be interesting to try one out and actually see how it works in person.

The touch was pretty much what people expected, and is usually pretty easy to predict since it follows the new iPhone in July.

iTunes 10, WTF is up with the close minimize and zoom buttons going vertical even in normal view mode? Also, looks like they took out color from most of the interface, going to a graphite look everywhere. And it still will cause video playback to stutter a bit when an iPhone is plugged into the system. Hopefully iTunes 11 will do something about that.

Also not sure what to think about Ping. Having never used or even looked at Last.fm much at all, not really familiar with the concept.

The new AppleTV doesn't interest me a ton currently, but it will depend on what they do with the old unit (if anything). AirPlay would be nice for video, and I have been pondering a Netflix subscription. The existing AppleTV I have though seems more capable then the new unit though, especially with the hackability. Currently it plays all my DVD rips off my ReadyNAS Ultra, due to the ease of having it run DVD Player.app.

Implemented by the same guy that designed the menu and interface in all the random brand DVD players IMO.

A couple thoughts on the new AppleTV:

The $99 price point is big. That's getting into impulse buy territory for the sort of people who queue up a day in advance for a new iPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if they sell a million of them, even if half of those go largely unused after installation.

Apple has fixed many of the bugs with the current AppleTV, most notably the insanely high idle power consumption. Also, it's now cheaper than an Airport Express for audio streaming.

The Boxee Box, for contrast, is ostensibly coming in at "under $200" (what, $199.95?). Of course it does a lot more, but it wil cost a lot more as well. At Boxee, I'm sure they're sweating bullets over this. I suspect that Boxee is also sweating over Apple having a reasonable library of "real" content to rent, while Boxee presumably hasn't been able to make similar deals.

I find it curious that Apple supports NetFlix (ostensibly a competitor!) while not supporting Pandora or other such music services. Clearly, there's something calculated going on here. This could be the opening that Boxee and its app model need to gain some leverage. On the flip side, I'm curious how well the new AppleTV hardware will run the Boxee software. My old AppleTV was a great box for Boxee, except that it would overheat and crap out. (To watch a one-hour show, I have to put an ice pack on it first.) Notice that Apple has a discrete little USB port on the back? That's the way you installed the original patchstick. It's almost like they're inviting the hackers in.

I find Apple's remote control to be absurdly useless. For contrast, the iPhone/iPod Touch UI is clearly the way to go. Too bad for everybody who doesn't have one. (Maybe I've got a use for my now-inactive iPhone 3G?)

This is mostly due to the Xbox heritage of XBMC which Boxee is based off. It sits in a tight loop constantly updating the screen even when nothing has changed. If you have Boxee running on something like a Mac mini, you'll hear the fans go into overdrive whenever the GUI is up as the CPU is pegged at nearly 100% usage. It drops a bit when it is actually playing something but it is still higher than it should be.

Changing it to reduce the high CPU usage has appeared as a feature request several times but each time it gets shot down as it would involve a major rewrite of the core which nobody is willing to do.


This is Apple we're talking about here so that is highly unlikely...

Would it really kill Apple to support FLAC

Perhaps not -- but would it really kill Apple to afford those who don't (literally) buy in to the all-Apple ecosystem, the benefits afforded to those who do? Actually quite possibly, yes.

Peter

I was thinking more about it today, and quite frankly there was quite a bit Apple didn't say about the AppleTV. If I'm left to assume, as I am, then I assume that the new AppleTV will behave exactly like the old TV when connecting to a secondary iTunes library. The primary library can sync with the old AppleTV, but while you can add additional libraries, those computers have to be on and iTunes running in order for the AppleTV to see them.

While this might not be a problem for us geeks, who probably always have our computers turned on, this will most certainly be a problem for people like my mom, who uses her AppleTV almost exclusively as a device to play music and slideshows, and usually has her computer turned off. Steve talked about how people don't want to sync with their computers, implying that the new way will be simpler. To me, this only adds to the complication of the device for users like my mom.

This new Apple TV will be a lot more straight forward IMO. While the computer needs to be ON, that much should be obvious to most people, in the same way that your CD player has to be ON to play music through your Amplifier which is also ON. Or that your car has to be ON to use the stereo in it. Etc...

I believe the process of syncing a portion of your collection to another device is a lot more foreign a concept.

Also, for any AppleTV owners who use a Mac and an Apple Airport, Wake on Demand, will allow people to keep their machines asleep most of the time, and the AppleTV will just wake it when needed. This is how the older one works too. If I play a show locally, works as expected. If I want to play a show only on my computer, I'll hear my system wake from sleep when I'm browsing the menus to select it.

I believe Bonjour 2.0 also added Wake on Demand to Windows, so as long as the machine supports the normal Wake on LAN and the network is hosted by an Airport, it should work. I'll try to do some testing later of this. Bonjour 2.0 is inside the print services, downloadable here.

Oh, anyone interested in the old AppleTV with hard drive, it's on clearance for $149.

It does Apple Lossless so yup. MP3 got by because of the wide support by everybody else.

Sorry, but those are terrible analogies.

Most people don't have their computers even in the same room as their home theater, first of all, so your average consumer tends to not make that connection. Second, it's not just that the computer has to be on, but iTunes also has to be open, or it doesn't work.

Trust me, I know this will confuse people. Why? Because my mother is more tech savvy than nearly all the people I support, and I've still had a great deal of difficulty getting her to understand that she can stream content from her computer if it's turned on with iTunes opened. See, she has the first AppleTV, which had a measly 40GB of space. Once you get an average amount of music and photos on there, you're left with little room for video, but she could still stream what isn't synced.

This isn't like "oh, I forgot to turn on my receiver, that's why there's no sound." In my mom's case, it's "damn, I forgot to turn on my computer, wait five minutes for it to boot, then launch iTunes. Now I have to walk up three floors to do that and come back down."


Seriously? You mean, the way every single one of those 250 million iOS devices that Steve was so proud of has been used since the very first iPod? I think people understand syncing.

What I'm hoping is that Apple simply wasn't ready to announce what they're going to do with Lala, and that the idea is that at some point the AppleTV will already know what content you own, and can simply organize it and stream it for you. Perhaps this is also part of their new datacenter plans. If that were the case, I would be far more enthusiastic about the new product.

As it is, it's hard for me to see this as anything but a product that's less then its predecessor. I just don't see anything better about this device.

Steve mentioned what was better. Namely, the price and the size.

You're putting too much thought into it. Streaming, from a computer, is how pretty much every single other media device out there works now.

With the AppleTV the main focus is on SALES. So you'll always see the rental options come up first. Just be glad this thing streams from a local network at all.

MP3 used to be the only thing supported by iTunes. iTunes is based on SoundJam, which Apple acquired, and there was nothing else to support at the time. AAC only came about with the music store as I recall.

True, all true. And I can't say they didn't accomplish what they needed to when it comes to the price, which is sort of the ideal price for consumer gadgets.

FWIW, and IIRC, Wake on WiFi only works on MacBooks starting with the Unibody MacBooks. And it's apparently a hardware issue, as they've pretty much stated outright that the prior MacBooks won't get it. I don't know about desktop Macs, but those are far more likely to be wired. And, yes, streaming from WiFi to WiFi is not ideal, but it's probably also not uncommon.

Do any non-Apple home routers support this yet? I really like the idea of what Apple has done, but this sort of things really should be a standard. (Or, heaven forbid that the AppleTV could remember, by itself, that it once saw an iTunes library at a given MAC address.)

You know what pisses me off about some of these Apple events or announcements? When an OLD feature is highlighted as something new.

The ability to show album art on the left in iTunes and sort the list by artist and then sub-sort by some album criteria (alphabetical or year) has been in iTunes since version 7. It's the single feature that actually made iTunes worth anything at all for looking at more than a dozen track collection.

The new twist on this feature is that by enabling it the way Steve showed, it will only show the artwork if there are at least 5 tracks from the album. Personally, I think that's a load of rubbish and just prefer to always show the artwork like that. Because now it's impossible to see the artwork for singles and other "abums" with only 4 or fewer tracks. You suck Apple.

You have been able to get to this feature in different ways, most recently by checking the "artwork" option in the View preferences to show album art on the left, and then clicking the ALBUM header which cycles through "Album by Year," "Album by Artist" and just plain "Album." It used to be much simpler than this as there was an arrow on the left of the header that simply allowed you to toggle the artwork on/off.

WIth iTunes 10 the artwork view comes automatically with a new view mode. Which is easier to see than setting the view options, but a bit redundant, IMO. It's even less interesting and useful than it used to be for a number of reasons:

-The artwork on the side is small and it doesn't resize when you change its column width. You can now pick "small" which is ultra-small, "medium" which is the default, and "large" which is scarcely bigger than medium. Kind of sucks on a high res screen.
-The name of the album appears to the RIGHT of the album artwork, which means that instead of possibly wasting vertical space, now you're wasting a shitload of horizontal space if you ever hope to read your album name - it creates a ton of empty white space which looks very bad.

What Apple did to make sure people use this new mode? The removed the "artwork" option from the View menu so now you can't do it the old (better) way.

And what about the OTHER possibly redundant information? Album year and genre for instance? Maybe it would have been nice to include the title UNDER the album artwork along with the name of the band and the year of the album. Genre can change between songs for those anal enough to set them that way, so don't bother to include that there.

Good job Apple. You guys can't design squat anymore. It amazes me that they can still keep ahead of everyone else. That says a lot. Everyone else sucks much much worse.

The current IETF draft (still a work in progress disclaimer), is called Sleep Proxy Service, an extension of mDNS (aka Bonjour). Source code is here, but as far as I know, no other router has grabbed any of it. Might be able to get it to work against one of the open source firmware projects like OpenWRT. Looks like they have a feature request for it already, but no work has been done.

As for Wake on Demand and WiFi, there wasn't a good clear cutoff on what models support it and what don't, as Apple has sometimes swapped out WiFi boards midmodel. The best way to check is referenced in the KB article I linked earlier. Basically check System Profile under Airport for "Wake On Wireless: Supported" Also, there is notes in the article regarding how to get Wake on Demand to work if the laptop lid is closed. Kinda a PITA currently, as it involves waking the system once after closing the lid.

So are streaming boxen really a migration scheme. Get everyone used to streaming content to the TV, then eventually no support for streaming from anywhere but the mothership?

Glenn, I'm sure if Apple could have made the Apple TV sound as promising without local streaming, they would have.

However, even its local streaming is primarily intended to stream video which you've purchased from the iTunes store. The formats supported don't really lend themselves to much more. I suppose some people may transcode their rips in the same way, but most people seem to now lean toward Matroska, with some old-school hold-outs still likely using avi. I use Handbrake, which does have the capability to support an mp4 container, but I still choose Matroska so have access to the Matroska tools and being able to include chapters, all the language tracks and subtitle tracks.

Here's another random question: what's the difference between the new "AirPlay" and the old tried and true "AirTunes"? So far as I can tell, both are designed to let you stream your possibly-protected music to another device. I'm assuming that AirPlay = AirTunes + support for video streaming, and is thus backward compatible, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out I was wrong.

(And, when I'm streaming iTune Store-purchased video from my existing iTunes on my computer to my existing AppleTV, aren't I already doing what AirPlay is all about?)

AirTunes is renamed to AirPlay, and adds video and photos. It's still a push setup that will also allow pushing that content off an iOS 4.1 device to the Apple TV. And yes, iTunes 10 sees my AirPort Express and Apple TV first gen as valid AirPlay targets, for audio only currently.

Apple is also working with 3rd party device manufacturers to add AirPlay to their devices, like speakers and such.

Definitely a much-needed feature. This will be also be great for people who want to travel back and forth between home and work computers.

I think the future (not very soon) is in cloud storage for this stuff, but not until a whole lot gets figured out. This is great for now.

I see no mention of Hulu for the Apple TV on Apple's site or Hulu's, I'm surprised, or am I blind?

Hulu never came up in regards to the Apple TV. Being that Hulu Plus is out for the iPad, it is a bit surprising, especially when it did get Netflix.

I'm sure Apple considers Hulu more of a competitor. They'd probably prefer to see Hulu go away.

Why don't they see Netflix as a competitor equally then ?

Hulu "give away"/sell TV, Apple want to rent TV shows.
Netfix rent movies, Apple want to rent movies.

I'm sure they do as well. But Netflix isn't run by the studios and I'm sure Apple's going to take a cut from them. I just corrected a typo in the original post, it should have read "more of" not "more or."

Also, specifically, Hulu was founded and is partially owned by some of the media companies Apple has had the most trouble with in the past, and who also didn't sign on to the new rental model. I'm looking at you NBC Universal.

Uh, wut? Who is going to lock down a corporate computer, but put iTunes on it?

Actually, Netflix even has a decent number of TV shows on it. In fact, the TV selection is arguably of higher quality than their movies!

For a while Heroes (not an argument for quality ) was going up on Netflix a day behind the original air date, and even now you can stream every episode of the show through Netflix. There are dozens of other shows on there that I might try out simply because I have a Netflix subscription.

So I agree, I do think it's curious that Apple would put Netflix on there. The only other reason I can think of is that Netflix's strategy might be paying off: become ubiquitous. Having Netflix on your home theater device has almost become table stakes, so when you don't have it you stand out in a bad way.

If it wasn't hard enough for dedicated music streaming products to carve out a niche for themselves, things look to be getting even tougher.

Apple's Air Play is building some momentum in the press and adoption by industry players. Even without looking toward future products or those already announced and just shy of shipping, now we have firmware updates to released hardware to bring Apple streaming compatibility. Denon is going to issue an update for a receiver they released back in April to support Air Play.

I'm guessing once you have WiFi that the rest is all a matter of software. This could end up being quite ubiquitous.

Well, local streaming is one thing. Streaming outside the home is another, and so far it appears Apple isn't the least bit interested in that model. I'm still not sure why they bought the Lala people, other than to kill the business.

Lala was a tiny service. If Apple were to roll it out, it would be a massive server crushing service simply due to it being built into iTunes. Odds are, anything done with Lala publicly will happen after Apple finishes their datacenter in North Carolina.

Umm, my employer? You have to fill out a request for it to be installed. But as long as you require it for your duties then they'll install it.

God, I really hope not!

What duties require the use of iTunes?

In the media industry, it's used quite a bit by producers, production assistants, etc. to review audio clips that have been recorded somewhere else. It's also used to ingest audio delivered on CD to distribute to other people (who don't necessarily need pristine WAV files).

My 16GB touch (2nd gen) has been busting out at the seams for a while. So I've been wanting to buy a 64GB Touch for a while now.

My 4th gen Touch arrived today.

In spite of the down grades compared to the 4G iPhone, it's still quite a step up from the 2G Touch.

I set it up as a new ipod in itunes and it synced everything just fine. That is to say all apps, music and drek is now on the new Touch. Settings did not transfer.

The case has no recurve around the top edge, this takes the buttons away from the beltline. Pressing the volume buttons is quite a bit more difficult.

The display is, hands down, better than the 2G's. Not just the image quality, but finger prints don't create diffractions as they do on the 2G.

That's good to hear, because by all accounts, including Apple's own specs pages, the display is not the same as used on the iPhone 4. same resolution, but not the same package (panel and glass). Supposedly no IPS and no oleophobic coating on the glass. For that matter I don't even know if the iPod has the gorilla glass used on the iPhone.

Will the new iTune 10 monitor directories to import automatically newly added tracks?

iTunes 9 added that feature when it came out last year.

OS X:
~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Automatically Add to iTunes/

Windows:
C:\Users\<user>\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Automatically Add to iTunes\

Sorry, I meant importing newly added tracks from user music base when it is not located where Apple wants it to be
In other words, my music collection is in K:\MEDIA\AUDIO. I would like that directory and subdirectories to be monitored for changes.

Is K:\MEDIA\AUDIO an iTunes managed folder, or just your own setup with MP3s and such?

If it's not iTunes managed and if you normally have "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" turned off, I'm not sure what the Automatically add to iTunes folder will do. It's possible that a combination of NTFS symbolic links might do what you want.

It is my setup with MP3 and such, organized per author/album/CD etc.

Yes, symbolic links is actually a good idea id ITunes10 does not yet offer the feature. I am not usre what will happen, though, and I am a bit afraid that iTunes may mess up my setup...

Ok, who DOESN'T think that Apple would clean the clocks of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft if it opened an App store for the AppleTV? Personally, I think Apple's unit sales would shame the other three very very quickly, making Apple the de-facto #1 console shipper in the world.

http://majicjungle.com/chopper2_iphone.html

http://bigbucketsoftware.com/2010/11/09/sneak-peek-at-the-incident-1-3/

The system is most definitely not optimized for state-of-the-art gaming, but then again neither is Nintendo's system - and at least ATV can output 720p. At a price of $99 plus a few bucks for a controller, it might be too sweet a proposition to pass up for a lot of folks. Just get the landscape wet with the current hardware then introduce a more capable platform next year. Plenty of software is already available. They'd clean house.