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Many iPod Mini’s & iLife

Apple announced the rumored Mini iPods this morning, along with some nice updates to its iLife software package.

iPods
Before announcing the iPod Mini, Steve released the sales figures for the “bigger” iPods. 730,000 for the fourth quarter of last year alone, and around 2,000,000 total. Wow! The iPod has 31% of the MP3 player market, and 55% of the MP3 player revenue. Not bad for one of the most expensive players on the market. I can confidently say they are worth every penny however.

The 10gb model of the old iPods has been bumped up to 15gb for the same price of $299. The other iPods stayed in the same configuration.

iPod Mini
This is the new “mini iPod” that has been rumored for a couple of weeks all over the internet. It comes with a 4gb hard drive and is roughly the size of a half inch thick stack of business cards. That makes it noticeably smaller than the current model, and definitely the smallest 1,000 song storage device available to my knowledge. The scroll wheel was redesigned to have the buttons actually part of the wheel, due to a lack of space on the front of the smaller iPod. Without actually using one yet, I’m going to guess this is going to make my only complaint with the current iPods even worse. Not only will you have to feel out the buttons for hands free operation, but now you have to try to press the correct quadrant of a super sensitive scroll wheel. But since I’ve never seen or used one, I could easily be wrong.

They also come in colors now; silver, blue, green, gold, and pink. I personally like the plain silver one myself… I think the others are a little tacky, but I know of some people that always asked me if mine came in other colors, so I guess there is a market for it.

The price for this new mini model is $249.00, which in my opinion is a little steep, considering you can get 11gigabytes more storage for only $50 by going with the new 15gb iPod. But I also read on a Mac news site that Apple retail employees think it will be a big seller because a lot of people were intimidated by even the 10gb iPod, worrying that they would never be able to fill it up with songs, and would be wasting their money. So now they can store 1,000 songs in an even smaller device than the original iPod, and they get a choice of 5 colors to go with it. Most of my friends think the new iPod is too expensive as well, but they are all geeks like me who are only thinking about the gigabytes, rather than other features that may appeal more to less computer savvy people. So Apple may be able to move these pretty quickly anyway, despite some people’s first reactions. I still can’t help but think if they had priced it at $150 or even $200, it would be flying off the shelves.

iLife
The iLife apps were all updated today, with the exception of iTunes.

iPhoto
iPhoto gets Rendezvous picture sharing, faster browsing, support for up to 25,000 pictures, smart albums, new slideshow transitions and options, the ability to rate your favorite photos, some new organization options, and a great new preview/slideshow mode.

Rendezvous Picture sharing
This will be a very welcome new feature indeed. I have an eMac and a 12” Powerbook, and have already been running into the problem of keeping my pictures synced between the two. Sometimes I sync the camera with the Powerbook, which means I don’t have them on the eMac, and vice versa. Now I can sync to either one, and easily browse all of the photos regardless of whether they are stored on the eMac or the Powerbook. You can also easily drag and drop photos from one album to another, so syncing the libraries together will be a snap.

Faster Browsing, support for 25,000 photos
This will be nice… I’ve already noticed quite a bit of slowdown when browsing our collection of 1,500 photos on the eMac, so hopefully this will help out that problem a lot. The speed on the eMac is tolerable right now, but I certainly won’t complain about a speed boost.

Smart Albums
Smart albums look cool as well. They work like smart playlists in iTunes, allowing you to make albums by date, or by rating, etc. So for instance you could display all pictures taken from December 15 to January 2 of 2004, with a rating of 4 stars or more. This would give you a smart album of pictures taken during the holidays, and would display your favorite photos of the bunch. And when you added new pictures from that time frame, perhaps from a family member’s camera, they would automatically load themselves into that album so you can have them all grouped together automatically.

New slideshow transitions and options
With the old iPhoto the slideshow automatically did a fade between each picture. But now with the new version you have a selection of transitions like cube, mosaic flip, dissolve, and wipe. You can also load an entire playlist from iTunes to play during the slideshow, rather than having the same song repeat over and over like the old iPhoto did.

New onscreen slideshow controls
This is one of my favorite new features. Now when you view a slideshow you can choose to see onscreen controls, which allow you to rate the picture, rotate it, or delete, all while the picture is being displayed full screen. Before it was hard sometimes to see enough details in the image from the thumbnails to decide whether you wanted to keep it or not. Now you can view them full screen, and still delete them or flip them on the fly. When the slideshow is over, the changes are reflected in the pictures in your iPhoto library.

iMovie
iMovie adds new transitions and titles, bookmarks, audio scrubbing, and easier movie sharing.

New transitions/titles
Going from memory, there are some new title effects like spin, which spins a the word in from the center of the screen, a picture cutout mode, which shows a black background with the words filled with a picture, and a movie cutout mode which does the same thing only with a movie clip. There is also a Star Wars style title effect…

Bookmarks
This along with the new waveform view for audio tracks should allow syncing transitions and video clips to music changes a lot easier. For instance make a bookmark right where a symbol crash is, then put your video transition at that bookmark to sync them perfectly. At least that’s the way I understand the feature, without actually using it. Audio scrubbing also allows you to sync things easier, as you can “fast forward” through the music and still hear it, so you can find quiet spots, etc.

Better Sharing
You can now select a single clip or several clips from iMovie and export them to the web, email, a bluetooth phone or PDA, or just as a Quicktime file to the desktop. Very handy.

Direct Trimming
Trim out part of a video just by clicking and dragging to shorten the clip. If you decide you wanted the long version later, just click and drag it back out, and it will still be there, iMovie doesn’t destroy the editing video clip until you empty the iMovie trashcan.

iDVD
I haven’t used this one much, as I want to get a good full DVD ready before I burn one. And now with the new iDVD, they can hold up to 2 hours of video, including the menus and everything.

New Themes
I think there are 20 new themes included in the new version, and the ones Steve demoed looked very nice and professional, just like the old ones.

Menu Transitions
Now you can put transitions between menus, like cube, wipe, and page curl.

New Slideshows
The slideshows now have customizable transitions, just like iPhoto, and you can also add a playlist to them like in iPhoto, so you don’t have the same song looping over and over.

DVD Map
You can now see a tree outline of your menus, so you can see how people will progress through all of the menus in the DVD and how they all interconnect.

GarageBand
This is the new iLife app that was announced today, and it looks absolutely incredible.

• 100 Software instruments
• 100 Audio Effects Presets
• 2,000 pre-recorded audio loops
• 15 Digital guitar amps
• 64 track digital mixing
• More more more…

Software Instruments
Using the onscreen piano keyboard in GarageBand, or a USB/MIDI keyboard sitting on your desk, you can play over 100 different instruments in real time on the Mac. Record them, mix them, etc. Steve had Jon Mayer help demo this feature live onstage and I thought it was quite impressive. Using only one little keyboard he played a bass, piano, organ, guitar, drums, percussion, etc and mixed them all into a quick song. Apple is offering a beginners keyboard for $50 to make this part more fun than clicking on screen to play the notes. Another cool thing is that once you lay down the rhythm and notes, you can change the instruments on the fly. So you could play a piano track, then change it to an organ sound in the middle of the song.

Pre-recorded Loops
Choose a drumbeat, a bassline, a guitar riff, a piano track, some percussion, etc. then drag them all onto the screen and arrange them how you like. They all sync up automatically to the same tempo on the fly, allowing anyone to create simple songs and background music with ease. Jon liked the fact that you can pick out a bassline and drumbeat, then play your guitar live through your Mac, along with the beat you had already started playing. This is basically a more simple version of Apple’s Soundtrack, but is still incredibly cool.

Record
You can plug in a guitar, bass, keyboard, or mic into your Mac and record in real time along with existing tracks already in GarageBand. For instance if you play guitar you could lay down a drumbeat, bass and piano them play over that sound in real time and hear yourself on the Mac or through headphones, etc. You can record it and mix it down after that.

Guitar amps
Plug a guitar into your mac with a $20 adapter, and you can play through 15 different digital amps in real time. They sounded like real guitar amps to me, but some guitar purists may not like them. For most people they will be great though, and it adds the effects in real time and records them directly to the Mac.

Mixing
All of the features above work perfectly together. You can play the piano parts on your keyboard, play the drum beat and bassline with pre-recorded loops, and then lay down the guitar and audio tracks on top of all of that in real time, and record it all.

Export
1 click exports your song to iTunes, where you can listen to it, add it to an iMovie project, sync it to your iPod, burn it to a CD, play it as background music in a slideshow, etc.

I of course haven’t used this app yet, but if it is even half as cool as it looked in the demo Steve gave on stage, this app will be a ton of fun to play with.

All of the above programs are part of iLife, which Apple is releasing on January 16th for $49, but it will be included with every new Mac for free. I’ll be pre-ordering my copy tonight!

It’s really mind blowing at how all of this stuff is integrated on the Mac. I mean out of the box you can record your own songs, burn them to CD’s with a few clicks, put them into an iMovie project along with digital still pictures, burn it all to a DVD, upload it all to your web site, and the list goes on and on. There is just so much fun stuff to create on the Mac…

I think John Gruber said it best in his post about today’s announcements:

“Apple is going after … People who want to be producers, not just consumers.”

Be sure to read the rest of his post as well. He always says exactly what I’m thinking in a much more eloquent way than I ever could.

There were a few more announcements today like new Xserves, Final Cut Express 2, MS Office 2004, etc. but they weren’t that interesting so I’ll just ignore them.

Overall I’m really really excited about getting the new iLife suite, and the new iPods are pretty cool too, I just won’t be trading in my 10gb model to get one anytime soon. Apple announcement days are the best! Much more exciting than Christmas.