The Skinny on the New iPods

Fresh off of the political conventions, I am back to work in my town. Apple is having one of their special events where Steve Jobs announces the latest Apple gadgets. Today’s event is at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a small theatre. Usually, the Apple events, such as Macworld and the WWDC are held in huge halls that fill up with a couple of thousand people. This invite only event will be much smaller with about 300 in attendance.

After sitting outside for about 2 hours with Bob Galbraith from Reuters, we were let into the building a half an hour before the event was going to start. As usual, there is tons of media and we all do our best to cram into a pretty tight space. Some photographers, who I will not name, bring just about every piece of camera equipment known to man in a giant roller and occupy enough space for three people. Despite having a huge piece of property, I am still being hit with their monopod(s).
The show, dubbed “Let’s Rock” starts at 10am. When Jobs came out on stage and you immediately notice how thin he is. He looks gaunt and weak. I’m not going to go as far as Bloomberg News and issue an obit, but he does not look well. Jobs did poke fun at the prematurely released obit by saying that "reports of his death are greatly exaggerated." The picture below is of two frames I have shot of Jobs. The image on the left is from today’s event. The one on the right is from 2005. What a huge difference. His wedding ring appears to dangle on his finger. I’m sure the health questions will be popping up in the coming weeks. An iTunes update was Job’s first announcement followed by a new version of the iPod Nano. New size and colors are being offered along with a new feature that allows you to shake the music player to activate the song shuffle. I hope you can turn that off or else the runners of the world are going to have a messed up string of partial songs. The iPod Touch also had a makeover. New prices and additional memory were some of the latest things to be announced. A man holding a small video camera behind let out an orgasmic gasp followed by a “yes!’ when Jobs described the new “Genius” feature that allows you to hit a button and create a playlist based on the genre of song that is playing. I wonder who he works for. Jack Johnson played a few songs to end the program. Such a laid back dude. I was surprised to hear Jobs say that Jack Johnson has sold more music on iTunes than any other artist. I still don’t believe it. Good for him.
Reporters and guests were now led to a room where they could play with the latest gadgets. Tables were set up with dozens of the new iPods. Jobs and Jack Johnson came by and left after a few minutes. Pretty cool products, just wish the Touch had more memory.