What are your opinions on the new products?

The iPod Touch with Facetime, etc.
The touchscreen nano
iTunes 10
The NEW Apple TV
Anything I missed?

I personally like the new iPod Touch, but think the new iPod Nano is WAAAAAY too small. The Apple TV is smaller but more powerful, and that brings us to iTunes 10: I have not yet tried it, but I will ASAP and tell you what I think of it, too.

I want an iMat.

LOL I want the iCountry... an iWorld is just too big!

I wait something that's jailbreak-able

I want the new iPod Touch, with jailbreaking available

New products are cool, but some people DEFINE themselves by Apple, and would buy anything that Apple makes, regardless of actual usefulness or price. That just doesn't make sense to me.

I agree, Kerm! I may enjoy using Macs, but some products, even Macs, I must admit, are overly praised. I would never buy a thing like the iPad! (Especially when you know it will be outrun by a new iPhone not much later) The point is, with computing devices improving so rapidly, there is almost no point in buying an Apple product, considering it will be outdated within one-six months! Apple products are too high in price to keep upgrading.

The thing I don't understand is that no matter what Apple comes up with, certain fanboys and fangirls regard it as the most amazing thing since sliced bread, even if it's not new. I have a 2-pound, Windows 7-running tablet PC that was made six years ago that has more powerful specs than an iPad, runs a full OS, has decent battery life, and is certainly not locked down to a particular company, OS, and set of tightly-controlled applications. People see the iPad and believe that it's a revolution in modern computing, when really it's just a rehashing of a decade-old idea, except with smaller and more power-efficient hardware.

That's not to say that rabid Apple-haters are right, either, but the company has way more of a cult following than it should. Even worse, its cult buys into its marketing and becomes their own marketing. How many iPad advertisements have you actually seen compared with, for example, car advertisements for a particular car? A lot fewer. Word of mouth and free advertising from the media (yes, Engadget, I'm looking at you and your front page filled with details as small as "OMG THE iTUNES LOGO CHANGED) have given them a huge boost, especially from the technologically marginally-literate who blame the company rather than themselves when they can't understand how to use a device.

These new products are stupid. Retards like ComicIDIOT will probably be all over them.

I dunno about that, I think we've weaned him off the Apple Kool-Aid a bit with the Build a Desktop topic.

Are they, though? I bought my music player about seven years ago and chose the smallest model (30GB; there was a 40GB and 60GB model). I ran out of space a while back so looked to upgrade on the Creative website and their biggest current model only had 32GB storage. I ended up swapping the 30GB hard disk drive for a 60GB one and went on my merry way. Capacity is not the only thing that's gone downhill; the physical user interface has gone steadily downhill since the pinnacle reached in the 1970s. I don't want to have to take the thing out of my bag or pocket to scrutinise a touch screen, I want to be able to feel the buttons and press them with my fingers.

I'm with BenRyves on this; I don't feel a need to upgrade to the latest and greatest every time it comes out. I replace my laptop when it breaks beyond repair, not because I can get a processor with 2 more FLOPS than my current one. I get a new MP3 player because my previous one had 256MB of non-upgradable flash storage and my newer one (which is over two years old at this point) has 8GB storage.

I have no need for a new iPod (Touch, Nano & Shuffle). A Multi-touch screen on a device that small? There's no practical use for a screen that small.

Apple TV. Sure. I can see my family getting one of those. We've been looking into Netflix for a while now. We'd put it on the PS3 but the fan is obnoxiously load and the Wii doesn't do HD, composite maybe but we have it connected with an RBY cable. Also, this way I can enjoy the movies & TV shows I purchase on a TV with friends rather than all huddled around a laptop screen.

I won't really have much a choice to update iTunes to 10, unfortunately as I don't care about this "Ping" service. That's what Twitter & FaceBook Fan Pages are for. There's too many social networks these days. Ping, from Apple, has a good launch, I won't lie. An easy 10,000,000 to boost the service over a few days. But I think people will still rely on Twitter & Fan Pages for everything. Ping brings nothing new to the plate.

Apple also allows it's users to follow each other. I still want to use FaceBook. Though Ping is a Music Network Site, not a general network site. We'll just have to see if Ping is a Hit or Miss, or if it'll sizzle out after a six month.

Why not plug the laptop into the TV?

I am going to get a new iPod Touch because the glass on mine broke a few months back. Not that I really want to drop $229 on one, the added features are nice. And it could even replace my digicam or cell phone for those heat-of-the-moment shots. The new Nano intrigues me, and if I can get one secondhand for cheap, or if I come across a very superfluous $150 I may get one just to tinker.

The AppleTV is nice and small now, but I am a little sad that they did away with the HDD and the Intel processor. Not that the A4 is a bad processor, but that also means iOS and not OS X, less hacking fun. Still never going to get one ever, hah.

And I am in the same boat as ComicIDIOT on iTunes 10 and not having a say in wether I upgrade or not. I am still very irked about the lack of tabbed browsing in the store, which is handy for when you are looking up apps. But no huge deal. This whole Ping deal is probably just gonna make the experience slower. I do hope they have streamlined the program itself some more. iTunes 9 was faster than 8 marginally, and I hope 10 is faster still. Or really, even runs on my old Mac.

I was just gonna say the exact same thing.

Regarding Ping, I'm fairly sure it will fizzle out; there are enough social networks already, and they've all devoted their whole existence to excelling at being social networks, so I don't see Apple succeeding in one side-projects where whole companies have failed.

@CDI: Were you one of the people who got Safari magically installed on your machine by iTunes? Actually, probably not, since I think you have a Mac rather than a Windows machine.

When I installed iTunes on XP ( for the month that I was running XP ) it was an option. But I unchecked it. Quicktime isn't an option by the way.

And yeah, because I have a Mac, Safari is a standard. Which is alright, because it means that for about 2 or 3 megabytes you can build a browser that njeeds no rendering engine of it's own. It can call Safari's!

I feel like a lot of relatively computer-illiterate users would just leave that checked and not realize what was going on. Those are the same users who end up with every browser toolbar in creation, by the way.

@comic: What does Apple TV offer that some other set-top box doesn't offer you?

http://cl.ly/2DHw/

Oh god, what did Apple do to iTunes?!

( via http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/ )

Safari is actually pretty decent on Windows these days, and I find it a good way to test sites in WebKit. (Chrome, on the other hand, installs strangely and leaves irrelevant background processes running on your machine - it's as if Apple and Google swapped development teams when building their browsers).