The buzz has been around for months and finally we get to hear the pricing. Retail pricing will be $249 and it will hit the shops in 14th November in the US.
What will people get for the money?
A 30Gb digital media player, with a three-inch LCD video screen; WiFi for passing music around and … wait for it …. an FM tuner. There’ll be three colours – black, brown and white.
Each device will come with songs (9), music videos (12), film shorts (3) and images loaded onto it.
Microsoft have learnt from Apple and will be releasing some new software to select content and load it on to your Zune.
Along side this will be the Zune Pass subscription service, which for $14.99/month will give access to “millions of songs.” The downside on this one is that once you stop paying, your stop getting access to the music.
If this doesn’t appeal, you can buy tracks individually at 79 Microsoft Points per track (Yes, less than iTunes). If you’re unfamiliar with Microsoft Points, they’re like pre-paid phone cards.
There’s going to be a ton of accessories available at launch, which are listed at the bottom of the press release and are prices between $20 and $100.
As to whether Microsoft will pursue current Apple customers to drop their iPods for a Zune, or more significantly, waste the money they may have spent buying music or videos on Apple iTunes, is quite another thing. As we all know iTMS customers would’ve had to burn all of their purchased tracks to disk and re-rip them to play them on a Zune.
Apple has for once pre-announced a new product, codenamed iTV (which is unlikely to be the final name as they’d get sued in the UK for a start).
In the UK, the iTunes music store was closed all day yesterday for refurbishment, with a black screen just saying ‘Showtime.’ At about 6pm (UK time) Steve Jobs announced why. There’s a slew of new/updated iPods and more content on the store as well as version 7 of iTunes for Mac and Windows (more on this later).
Movies (and video from the iTunes store) are now stored in 640 x 480 format.
Both the Nano and iPod video now have search features so that albums can be searched for etc., using the click wheel (with on-screen letters and search criteria). Gapless playback is a new feature, so songs can be played continuously without the normal two second wait between songs. There’s no beat matching yet, but maybe that’s Apple’s next enhancement so DJ’s will be out of a job.
iTunes 7 is now available for download. The indexing has been improved, as has navigation by re-organising the Library and other indexes that normally appear on the left hand side. If iTunes is linked to an account on the iTunes store, it can now download artwork for any music on your system. Searching is also easier, as both music and video can be searched by viewing the artwork and then seeing what’s available in say that album.
All movie and video content is now stored in 640 x 480 format.
The exchange of Apple’s might-catch-fire batteries is happening faster than originally anticipated.
According to new research from The Diffusion Group, only 14% of broadband households would be interested in an iTunes online movie download service for use on PCs or portable devices if titles were priced at $15 each. This compares to total interest of 23% at $10 per download – a 64% decline in interest when increasing the cost per title by only $5.
Regardless of whether the iTunes movie download service is announced this month or later this year, Greeson believes that the time is right for Apple to enter this market space. “Although current services such as CinemaNow and Movielink continue to languish, Apple is aware that the conditions are now suitable for extending iTunes to include full-length movie downloads. Consumer awareness has improved; video-over-broadband is now viable; studios are now making movies available for online download to DVDs; portable video platforms are improving qualitatively with each new generation; and Apple’s brand awareness and credibility are at all time highs. As well, CinemaNow and Movielink’s experience, while insightful, is of limited value to Apple, who continues to enjoy the fruits of being a market-maker in portable digital electronics and online media services.”
In a Star Trek-like melding of minds, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is joining Apple Computer’s board of directors, setting tongues wagging that some kind of alliance between the technology giants could be looming.
The addition of Schmidt to Apple now brings the total number of board members to eight, and these include Steve Jobs, Al Gore, former vice president of the United States and the head honchos of Intuit, J. Crew and Genentech.
Apple have announced that they’re recalling 1.8 million laptop batteries including 1.1m in the US. This follows a 
Apple has announced the new G5 PowerMac, a quad Xeon, 64-bit desktop workstation stuffed with two new Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors running up to 3.0 GHz which are claimed to deliver “up to twice the performance of the Power Mac G5 Quad.”
Graphics are taken care of with a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of video memory, with dual-display support.
Saturday saw anti-DRM protests at eight Apple stores across the USA organised by DefectiveByDesign, who are running an on-going ‘Campaign to Eliminate DRM.’
List of Apple stores affected