Apple raises the bar

Apple pundits and watchers had spent the best part of two weeks working themselves into fervour. The problem with events where everyone expects you to do something, is that – well – when you do, it feels like creeping downstairs on the night before Christmas and sneaking a peak at your presents.

So did all the fervour live up to the hype, well yes, and no.

Certainly the sleek new iPods live up to expectation, thankfully Apple has gone retro on itself by remodelling the successful Nano series on the older iPod Mini – a favourite with women purchasers. For mach men types there’s a big 80Gb game (limited) version with enhanced screen. But really this was nothing more than an extrapolation of the line on the graph. Enough to beat the competition, sure.

So there must be ‘one more thing’?

Well, as we stated video downloads are pretty much nothing out of the ordinary now. So Apple will need to come up with something extraordinary to pull itself away from the crowd. Unfortunately it seems that the offering in the video space isn’t enough to achieve this. A downloadable solution with low quality video – 640×480 – versus the new ‘must have’ HD standard for the plasma geek brigade. Even the costs are similar to your local blockbuster at between $9.99 and $14.99 for newer releases.

Worse still it seems that Apple are only offering 75 new titles at launch.

Certainly things will improve but we imagine the market will not be too impressed with the lacklustre video quality and the current dearth of titles. Jobs also announced a wireless video appliance – but that will require a PC somewhere in the house running the appropriate software and with the appropriate hardware – not exactly replacing your DVD player or new HD Tivo – similar quality to S-VHS not the DVD Mr Jobs tout’s.

The world is moving to HD so Apple needs to get there ahead of the crowd. At the moment Apple provide teaser HD samples on its website (and have done for over two years). It seems that even Mr Jobs hasn’t been able to move Hollywood despite his connections and reputation.