Apple Replaces B/W White iPods with Color Screens 113
FlameboyC11 writes "A quick check at the Apple online store shows no sign of the black-and-white screened 'white' iPods. The iPod Photo has replaced them in the 20GB and 60GB categories, but is keeping the same price scale ($300 for low end and $400 for high end). This seems like such a quick switch to color, perhaps a video player is coming faster than we think?"
Nope (Score:3, Insightful)
About Time Too! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, you don't actually *need* colour if you just want to listen to music, but it's more vibrant, more dynamic and fits better with the look of OS X.
And the brick game looks a little nicer too. I was hoping for Arkanoid, but there you go.
A video iPod would have to be very large to be worthwhile (I'm more than doubtful of the video success of the new Sony PSP, but it'll take a while for the results to come in on that). A large unit contradicts what the iPod is all about - a small, convenient device for a single purpose.
Lastly - I don't see why people want video while they're out and about. Audio I can understand - you can easily walk around and listen to music. Video? I look forward to the first hysterical warnings brought on by teens walking accidentally into traffic while watching their PSPs. You just can't watch video and do other things. It's too intrusive.
Re:About Time Too! (Score:4, Insightful)
The iPod Photo plugs into the video-in jack on your TV and displays the images on there.
The iPod also has stereo audio out. Duh.
iTunes has started selling video content. But why?
Put the pieces together.
It may not be for a while, but I would bet money that we'll see iPods that are capable of playing QT7 HD/MPEG4 video through a standard RCA AV cable when plugged into a Televison.
Re:About Time Too! (Score:5, Insightful)
iMovie now supports HD video, as does iDVD, and QuickTime 7.
I know that I would rather edit, export a HD movie, dump it on my iPod and bring it over to a friend's place to preview than waste time burning DVDs of rough cuts.
This shit is cool. And it fits in well with the way Apple seem to be going with iLife.
My G5 isn't fast enough for a video iPod (Score:5, Insightful)
Being Apple its going to come in H.264. Thats great. I love playing back H.264. What I don't love is encoding it. It took me over 24 hours to encode a 2 hour DVD. As my G5 can only just handle playing 1080i there seems little chance of an iPod handling it in the near future (hell, my powerbook can't do it). So do I download the 1080i then re-encode for my iPod, or do I download the 1080i version and get the 480p version for free? I don't think so. It seems more likely that Apple will charge us twice, or not offer the 1080i version. As for re-encoding, that seems unlikely too - unless the iPod has re-encoder built into it.
As this is obviously a post designed to generate speculation...
iTMS is not a good place to get movies. A good movie requires 2 hours on continuos attention, and on average I'll watch a purchased DVD twice. Music can be enjoyed in the background and I'll listen to a good song twice a day for a month. DVD is not even like books. In general, you can (even though its hard) put a good book down at any point and still enjoy it as much. Also, DVD take up too much space. iTunes is good, because I don't have to look for a CD anymore. Everything is in one place and instantly accessable. To be equivalent, 1080 would require home users to have close to 1TB of storage. Not unlikely, but not now.
iTMS is a great place for TV. I wouldn't mind picking up a 480p TV show. I watch TV exactly once. I know this, so I don't mind deleting it once I'm done - it hurt at first, but I haven't regretted it once (I'm a natural hoarder). I consume TV differently to DVD. I wouldn't mind there being advertisements. I wouldn't mind them tracking my viewing habits and giving me adverts that I want. I would like to be able to tell my iPod that I'm interested in a product and to add the products site to my 'adverts' bookmark folder. In this respect I'd expect Apple to step into the same role as a conventional network - just with a much larger audience. But in return I'd expect the content to be free. They could sell me an add free 1080i, as long as it had no adverts and I was free to burn it to Blu-ray and the cost was similar to a song. File size aside - $5 for a 60 minute show, that I watch once seems expensive - $20 a month all you can eat, now your talking.
Re:My G5 isn't fast enough for a video iPod (Score:2, Insightful)
The reality of this is that h264 is a scalable codec and whats going to be in primary focus is short films, video clips and television shows formatted for mobile viewing, ie. possibly less than 480.
Personally I think the video store will be as relevant as the hardware its supporting, the current format of the iPod screen is really not sufficient to drive it.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Cheaper (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:About Time Too! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll go one further and speculate that they reached the point where adding it to the low-end model was probably cheaper than keeping the B&W screens around.
This way, they have one stock display part going into all full-sized iPods. Less inventory management is usually a good thing.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
Ogg Vorbis is completely irrelevant to me and the majority of music player owners.
It is an obscure container format (OGG) and codec (vorbis). It is somewhat popular with a small clique of linux geeks because it is open source and royalty free. Unfortunately, it requires either an FPU (which the iPod lacks) or a lot more integer capacity than the iPod could provide. There are also some echo artifacts which can occur with vorbis.