New Apple Products

This past Wednesday, September 1, 2010, Apple Inc. held it's annual conference to announce the release of its newest products. The biggest announcements were the introduction of the new AppleTV, and also the new line of iPods.

The greatest improvements of the AppleTV include the incredible size reduction, and also the significant price reduction. For those who don't know, AppleTV connects to one's television and allows the user to stream content from a computer to the TV such as pictures, music, or movies. AppleTV also allows users to rent TV episodes and movies. This is another change Apple made. Previously, users were able to purchase episodes and movies, but this required storage. By removing the need for storage, Apple's design team was able to reduce the size of AppleTV to a quarter of the size.

The new line of iPods was the highlight of the event, without question. Starting with the iPod Shuffle, Steve Jobs showed that they had further reduced the size of the already-micro Shuffle. Other features include Voice Over, allowing the device to speak playlists to the user, and also integrated buttons (reintroduced after being removed in the previous model). Next was the iPod Nano. As the name suggests, an iPod "Nano" should be extremely small. Apple wanted to do this without sacrificing screen size. Their alternative, remove the circular trackpad and make the screen responsive to touch. Also, by making it so small, Apple added a clip on the back of the Nano to make for easy carrying. Lastly, the iPod Touch was upgraded. Steve Jobs demonstrated that the Touch now has both a front-facing camera (users may now video chat on the iPod Touch) and also an HD camera on the front of the device. This actually throws the iPod Touch into the compact camcorder market, and makes itself a pretty legitimate contender, considering the fact that users can purchase Apple's award-winning video editing software iMovie and edit movies right on their iPod Touch.