Apple's Latest Intro Morass: Is Steve Jobs Inc. Running Out Of Gas?

When Apple hits a bad note in front of a few dozen N. California-based reporters at its corporate headquarters, the damage is notable but manageable. When Apple hits a bad note in front of hundreds of US-wide reporters at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, as it did today, and especially after the company’s PR troops have breathlessly hyped the event as a ‘big deal’ in order to get folks to fly out (at their publications’ expense, of course) and attend, the consequences are…ahem…somewhat less controllable. So it is that you should prepare yourselves for the inevitable media backlash to this morning’s disaster, along with plenty of further ruminations on the state of Steve Jobs’ health (photos courtesy of Engadget):

To be perfectly clear upfront, I didn’t personally attend today’s City By The Bay soirée. However, I monitored the liveblogs from sites like Ars Technica, Engadget, Gizmodo and Macworld…and like them, walked away incredibly unimpressed. You gotta know things haven’t gone well when you see comments like the following from Gizmodo:

Someone is laughing crazily in the background. He must be watching a different keynote than we are.

Out of fairness, I should point out that the blame isn’t all Apple’s to bear. The company’s case partners leaked plenty of product shots and dimension sketches ahead of time, for example, thereby ruining some of the surprise. But Apple also prematurely telegraphed its moves; why else would it cut the prices of refurbished then-current-generation iPod classics, nanos and touches?

So what did Apple roll out?

• iTunes v8, with a new visualizer (woo hoo!) and playlist-generation capabilities ("Genius") that incorporate social networking enhancements. Social…gee, where have I heard that before? Conveniently (for Apple, that is), Genius also recommends additional music that you might like (to buy, that is) from the iTunes Store.
• No announced updates to the iPod shuffle (though more colors are now available, as it turns out).
• A revisit of the first- and second-generation iPod nanos’ tall and skinny form factors, albeit with a portrait orientation widescreen LCD this time around, in multiple colors (but not white), and adding a 16 GByte option while obsoleting the 3^rd generation’s 4 GByte capacity variant. Tall and skinny…widescreen LCD…multiple colors…8 and 16 GByte options…gee, where have I heard that before? And won’t the built-in accelerometer, intended to kick the nano into ’shuffle’ mode when you shake it, cause problems when you’re…umm…running? Or mountain biking?
• An evolution of the ‘thin’ iPod classic from 80 GByte to 120 GByte, coupled with extinction of the ‘fat’ 160 GByte iPod classic. An 80-to-120 GByte HDD upgrade…gee, where have I heard that before?
• Minor tweaks to the iPod touch (thinner enclosure, external volume controls, built-in speaker and Nike+ receiver), commensurate with price drops (that were likely influenced by the 3G iPhone’s now-subsidized lower prices).
• A (claimed) bug-fixing v2.1 firmware upgrade for the iPhone and iPod touch.
• A return to the iTunes Store for NBC Universal, in combination with the ability to download HD versions of videos to computers and iPods…which you’ve been able to do with Apple TV since mid-February, and
• Lest we forget, a plethora of Apple-branded hardware add-ons that’ll further put the hurt on the market size and profit margin potentials for the company’s accessory ‘partners’,
• But no subscription music program, whose continued absence profoundly baffles me (for reasons I’ll save for in-depth treatment in a future post),
• And no A2DP two-channel (aka ’stereo’) Bluetooth audio-supportive hardware, either.

Color me underwhelmed, particularly given the preparatory hype generated by Apple. The press doesn’t like to have its time and money wasted, and I strongly suspect that the company will soon regret their over-enthusiastic promotion. And bigger-picture, as time goes on, Apple seems to be acting more and more like a monopolistic company that’s run out of new ideas, that sees the digital music market (at the core of its last-few-year resurgence) maturing and therefore its growth slowing and its profitability evaporating, and that is responding by attempting to seize as big a slice of the total pie as possible. Speaking of pies, if I was Steve Jobs, I’d actually be quite worried about a chart he tossed up early on in the pitch (this time the shot’s from Gizmodo):

A big chunk of ‘other’ is probably Creative Labs. And that last 2.6%? Microsoft. ‘Nuff said? I thought so.

Whaddya think, folks? Agree or disagree with my stance on today’s news?

Followup: As several commenters have already pointed out, the v2.1 iPod touch firmware upgrade is free for folks who’ve already dropped $10 on v2.0. Apologies for the Brian’s Brain boo-boo. I’ve accordingly corrected the above writeup.