Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iPod Family, Apple Financial, iMac, iPhone
The iPod and the "product transition"
Perhaps the most interesting and mysterious two words heard yesterday during Apple's big conference call were "product transition." The biggest surprise of the call was that Apple was setting its profit guidance much lower than expected, and the two big causes they gave for doing that were "higher commodity costs" (because they believe they got a good deal on iPhone components this quarter) and these mysterious "product transitions." So what's the deal there?Almost unanimously, the analysts are predicting a product shakeup, specifically in the iPod family. Ars says multitouch is coming, Forbes suggests that Apple tipped its hand to upcoming product changes, and Apple Insider has Ben Reitzes, who was the first analyst to question the low guidance, suggesting that an iMac redesign or "ultra-portable" may be in the works.
But the majority of analysts say it's the iPod that Apple will focus on. The iPod has been waiting in the wings, watching the iPhone and OS X get all kinds of pretty updates, and call it what you want-- the halo effect or trickle down-- the iPod is ready for a refresh. ThinkSecret comes right out and says it: we'll see a 6G iPod as early as the first half of August.
Whatever this "product transition" might be, odds are we'll hear about it sooner than later. Apple's execs made it clear that by the time they did another call in October, everything would be made much clearer.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
h8rain said 8:56AM on 7-27-2007
According to mactactic, the current iPod was released 318 days ago. I hope they do something soon, because my wife's iPod died, and we are betting that something new is about to drop
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Matteo said 9:27AM on 7-27-2007
I favour the idea of a new iPod as "transition". Apple estimated lower revenues and this can be explained, in my opinion, with a release of a new iPod.
Here's why:
- releasing a new iMac would most certainly impact sales in a positive way (increase), whereas the stock of iMacs Apple has to empty seems to be quite limited ("discounted" products with a lower margin)
- releasing a new iPod would mean that the current model it replaces (or "improves") would have to be discounted. This means far lower margins on these + a lot of "stock" to empty.
A transition to a new iPod would also mean that not necessarily sales of the new device pick up speed immediately as the "average customer" might really be tempted by the discounts (remember iPod buyers are not the classical Apple Computer buyer).
Price drops across the line, for many products (besides of course back to school sales) is unlikely to happen, because of the momentum Apple enjoys...
That, at least, is my take...
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Enrique said 10:18AM on 7-27-2007
Yo Steve - August 12th - My bday - I want a 6th Gen iPod? Cool? If you don't have it quite ready for production, would you mind just hand-delivering it to my house? My 4th Gen 40 Gig Black and White iPod is cool and all, but seriously, it's time to update the UI.
Thanks! (If you want, I'll get you a Zune for your bday)
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Henry said 11:49AM on 7-27-2007
yo, enrique. My birthday is on the 15th, HOORAY! so... an iphone with 60gigs of storage, a touch screen, and minus the phone part.
GIVE IT TO ME!
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Brett said 2:30PM on 7-27-2007
Nice picture at the top... but I can tell you... the wheel on the iPod is a thing of the past. Simple directional flips across any part of the screen will change the song or scroll through your playlists when they release the 6g iPod.
Andrew Eller makes a good point... I'd expect the 6g iPod closer to the end of Q3... similar to the iPhone's release at the end of Q2.
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Reg Muffet said 9:58PM on 7-27-2007
Brett > "the wheel on the iPod is a thing of the past. Simple directional flips across any part of the screen..."
Maybe the wheel will go, but it can actually do a big thing that the touchscreen cannot:
On an iPhone, if you want to get to a specific point in a 30 min podcast, or 15 hour audiobook, it is VERY difficult.
The reason is that the touchscreen method of dragging the playhead is not nearly as precise as spinning a wheel.
The wheel has a "velocity algorithm," that is, the faster you spin, the faster the playhead moves and vice versa. Combined with the infinite number of turns you can make with your thumb, the wheel makes a very precise navigation control.
But the touchscreen requires a one to one mapping between finger position and on-screen slider, which means a maximum theoretical range of only 200 pixels or so (assuming the touchscreen has a pixel accurate resolution, which I doubt), and a practical range of far fewer steps.
The result is that the touchscreen slider is rather useless for navigating to a precise position through long stretches of audio. Out of a 30 min podcast, you're lucky to get within a minute or two of where you want to be, and the accuracy gets worse the longer the recording. (Thus making it very annoying when iPhone loses your place in a 25 hour Harry Potter book.)
Hopefully, it will be possible to duplicate the wheel function in a future refinement of the touchscreen interface (an on-screen "virtual" wheel might work), but at the moment, a wheeled iPod still has this going for it over the touchscreen.
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Greg G said 4:10AM on 7-28-2007
And what of the rumors of a redesigned MacBook?
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Brett said 8:35AM on 7-28-2007
Reg - You're right... the click wheel precision is nice... but I doubt that will stop them from getting rid of it. I just tried repositioning the playhead on a 2 hour movie on the iPhone and got increments of about 1:30. That's relatively close enough to get back to a part of a movie or an hour long podcast.
As for the 25 hour audiobook... that's such an extreme case. It could even take you a couple minutes to find your place in a physical book if you lost your bookmark and didn't know exactly what page you were on.
I'd think they'd add some sort of movement feature to the fast forward or rewind buttons that exist on the iPhone. Then you could flick across them at different speeds to get different increments of searching. That along with the playhead would get you very accurate searching.
I'm still pretty sure the wheel's days are numbered.
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mark said 7:32PM on 7-29-2007
an often-reliable source tells me that the "product transition" is the long-rumored apple TVs. this is unconfirmed, so, grain of salt and all....
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Andrew Eller said 9:58AM on 7-30-2007
There will NOT be a new iPod before September 16th. My guess is that we will see new iPods on September 18 or 25. The reason for this is that they never release new iPods during the college student promotion. They use that promotion to deplete their inventories of the current gen product before releasing their next-gen device.
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dawg said 12:06PM on 7-31-2007
The new iPod will come out on the seventh of August.
That's my prediction.
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