Thrifty Decor Chick

Thrifty Decor Chick - Pretty awesome looking tile floor (faux).

Steve Jobs

So very very sad......he was so young.

Steve Jobs, Apple Founder, Dies


Steve Jobs, the visionary in the black turtleneck who co-founded Apple in a 
Silicon Valley garage, built it into the world's leading tech company and led a 
mobile-computing revolution with wildly popular devices such as the iPhone, 
died Wednesday. He was 56. 

 

 

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"All of your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them." -  ºoº Walt Disney ºoº  

 

Apple Unveils Updated iPod Nano, Touch

• By Chloe Albanesius
• October 4, 2011 01:59pm EST

 

Apple on Tuesday announced two updates to its iPod line, including a nano with swipe features and a revamped iPod touch.

The new iPod touch will incorporate iOS 5, which Apple's Phil Schiller said is a "tremendous upgrade" for the device. That includes access to iMessage, Apple's version of BlackBerry Messenger.

Apple's iMessage "brings the functionality of iPhone messaging to your iPod touch, so you can easily send text messages, photos, videos and contact information to an individual or group on other iOS 5 devices," Apple said.

The new iPod touch also works with iCloud, which will be released on October 12 along with iOS 5. When content changes on one device, all your other devices are updated automatically and wirelessly.

The new iPod touch is available now in black and white. The 8GB will sell for $199, the 32GB will retail for $299, and you can buy the 64GB for $399.

The new nano includes a redesigned interface with larger icons and multi-touch capabilities. There are also 16 new digital clock faces, and Schiller promised updated fitness features. "Right out of the box, you can go for a run and upload all of the data about your run into Nike Plus Web site," he said. "With the new iPod nano we have updated some watch faces so that people can use them with the new wave of watch band cases."

The 8GB nano will be $129, while the 16GB will retail for $149. Both are available today in seven colors, including silver, graphite, blue, green, orange, pink, and (PRODUCT) RED.

Cook said today that the iPod now has 78 percent market share and has revolutionized the industry. Apple has sold 300 million iPods in the last decade, and 45 million from July 2010 to June 2011, he said. Apple's iTunes now has 20 million songs, and users have downloaded 16 billion.

Today's announcements come on the eve of the iPod's 10th birthday, and Apple held today's event in the Town Hall room on its campus, where the music player made its original debut. In recent weeks, there have been various news stories predicting the death of the iPod, particularly the the iPod Classic, in favor of a solely touch-based iPod lineup.

But Apple said today that its holiday lineup will still include the iPod shuffle for $49 and a 160GB iPod classic for $249.

Back when it made its debut in 2001, PCMag said it was the "world's coolest—and dare we say best—MP3 player." Since that first iPod, Apple has unveiled the Mini, the shuffle, the nano, and iPod touch, also rolling the music player into its iPhone smartphone when that device debuted in 2007.

According to recent analysis by Fortune magazine, iPod sales hit their peak during the 2008 holiday season—from around 22.7 million iPods sold at the end of that year to an expected 8.39 million iPods sold within the third quarter of 2011. But given Apple's shift to the iPhone and iPad, both of which bundle the iPod software and been selling steadily, the dip is not that shocking.

For more from today's Apple event, see the slideshow below.

For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.

 

 

"All of your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them." -  ºoº Walt Disney ºoº  

 

iPods

Are the iPods Apple's Forgotten Children?

Now that Apple has become the company of the iPhone and iPad, has it forgotten about the product line that started it all?

• By Will Greenwald
• October 4, 2011 04:26pm EST
• 

The biggest news to come out of Apple today was the iPhone 4S, but that doesn't mean it was the only news. Apple announced the new iPod touch and iPod nano as well, and like the iPhone 4S, the new fifth-generation iPod touch and seventh-generation iPod nano look very similar to the previous versions.

Let's be blunt: unlike the processing power upgrade of the iPhone 4S, the new iPod touch and iPod nano are nearly identical to the older versions. Same capacities, same features, same OS (the new iPod touch ships with iOS 5, while the old iPod touch will get iOS 5 in a free update available October 12), same chassis, nearly same prices. If it wasn't for the white version of the iPod touch, it would be easy to say that Apple wasn't offering upgrades, but discounts. The iPhone 4S gets a shiny new processor and lots of new graphical power, but the iPod touch and iPod nano are getting little more than new color schemes, fitness features, and clock faces.

That brings us to the iPod itself. The first device series. The iPod classic. While the iPod nano is arguably going into its seventh generation, the iPod classic is still in its sixth. While Apple refreshes its other iPod and iOS devices roughly once a year, the iPod classic is the same device it was when it came out in 2008. Physical hard drive, 160GB of space, click wheel, color screen, $250 price tag.

It's clear the iPod classic is still selling, otherwise Apple would have stopped supporting it. However, it's gone nearly untouched. It's clear Apple has no plans to refresh the iPod classic, make it solid state, or give it any new features. It's also becoming uncomfortably clear that Apple is learning towards treating the iPod touch and iPod nano the same way.

The iPhone does everything the iPod classic, iPod touch, and iPod nano does, and more. The smartphone functionality makes it a better device than the others in every way, and its success as the top smartphone proves that. Similarly, the iPad does much more than Apple's iPods and offers apps and functions even the iPhone can't match. Apple's iOS propelled Apple to dominance in the smartphone and tablet mobile device fields, and with solid state memory so inexpensive now, the iPhone and iPad have simply muscled out much need for the iPod classic. Even the iPod touch and nano are becoming also-rans, with Apple's repeated attempts to retool the nano and half-hearted attempts to pitch the iPod touch as an iPhone without a phone part clearly demonstrating that.

Even if you don't have an iPhone, odds are your cell phone will do everything an iPod classic can. Android smartphones are capable of playing movies and music and browsing the Web, and even most feature phones can play MP3s and movies. Yes, the iPod classic offers the most storage, but hard drives are much less hardy than flash memory, and nearly all smartphones are smaller and lighter than the iPod classic. The lower storage capacity is a more than fair trade off.

Apple will keep selling iPods, but it seems unlikely that it will work on them anymore. Apple iPods have become legacy devices, still available for people who haven't moved on to tablets and smartphones but not offering anything new. They're a technological dead end, and unless Apple comes out with an amazing new feature for a small, non-cell-phone-network device to have that makes it compelling, it doesn't look like the iPod classic, iPod touch, or iPod nano are going to go anywhere. The iPods were great, but it's the age of the iPhone and iPad.

For more, see Why the Zune Couldn't Touch the iPod Touch. For more from today's Apple event, see the slideshow below.

 

 

"All of your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them." -  ºoº Walt Disney ºoº