The Smugness of Apple

Steve Jobs danced across the stage today, introducing a new collection of iPods. There weren't many surprises. Actually, were there any surprises?

Well, yes. The prices were surprising. First, wow, what a slap to anyone who ran out and bought an iPhone. A wait of 69 days saves you a cool $200! At $399, the 8GB iPhone begins to look attractive. It's biggest failing, for me, is the inability to create Word or Excel documents. You can look at them, but don't touch, let alone create. This is just a software revision away, but since the iPhone is a closed development environment -- unless you want to hack it open and risk voiding warranties, etc. -- I'm not holding my breath.

Still, even lacking that the iPhone is now a serious contender as Bob's Next Phone. I gave up on Documents to Go on my Treo 650 since it was the source of almost every problem I had on the Treo. Since then, I haven't edited much of anything on the Treo. If the iPhone has some basic editor, something to jot little notes into that will then sync with Outlook, I might be tempted. Absent that, the music and video features of the iPhone aren't enough to stop me from leaping to T-Mobile (I'm currently an AT&T subscriber) and grabbing a Wing (for $100 after assorted rebates).

In fact, on ninth thought, if I do that I'll have $300 for a portable media player (PMP), assuming I want to spend as much as on an iPhone alone. That means the newly revised and re-priced and re-named iPod Classic 80GB model is within range. $250 for 80 gigs is better than great. Off the top of my head I can't think of another PMP that matches that capacity for that price.

For that price and with that capacity I might opt to re-rip my library into Apple lossless format (ALAC) and fit a fair amount of my stuff onto the iPod. Or I can leave well enough alone and bring roughly 90% of my entire library into the iPod. Or I can get ornery, install Rockbox, and re-rip everything into FLAC. Oh, the vast temptations.

Or I can save some money and just get a new 4GB iPod Nano. Leave well enough alone on my file formats, which sound just fine on my system and to my ears, and save $100 in the deal. Oh, I bet Apple is just smug as a bug in the rug seeing me seethe with this many options.

Me, looking at an iPod. Who knew?