The presence of “social” features in iTunes 9 is interesting, though — taken with the last updates to iMovie and iPhoto, it shows a relatively new openness on Apple’s part to integrate with third-party services. Hope for Hulu on the Apple TV? Maybe, but so far Apple seems to think Youtube and the iTunes Store are sufficient — so the question becomes whether they’re going to try to push the Store to be a better competitor. The background question, of course, is whether their licensing allows them to do that. AFAIK there’s still no “official” support for Hulu on *any* set top box, and we can be pretty sure that’s not because of any technical limitation.

So, my questions are, 1) where does the video and voice -recording, FM time-shifting, step-counting Nano fit into the product line? You can now get a feature that was previously specific to their highest-end iPhone 3GS (video) as well as features that aren’t in any of their other devices (FM tuning, pedometry) in their cheapest iPod (with buttons). 2) Having no other medium than USB syncing to get the video and pedometry data off the Nano, what the heck is the current market of ADHD’ers going to do with those features? At least the Touch, with its WiFi capabilities and greater storage, would have a hope of doing something compelling with these features. The iPhone 3G, left without them, would be able to do even more with its always-connected service and integrated GPS. Yet they cost more and don’t have these new features. I’m confused.

@Tim F.
Yes, HD’s are well suited to writing video in real time. The Flip’s HD 720p videos, once encoded in H.264, have a 9 Mbit/s bitrate: http://www.theflip.com/products_flip_ultra_specs.II.shtml Even wimpy 1.8″ hard drives can write a that slightly over 1 MByte/s rate, sequentially. It’d be no challenge for a magnetic HD to handle the lower-res video the Nano is outputting.

@Fanfoot
Don’t you think the Touch is expensive enough? Well performing Flash SSDs alone in 128 MB capacities are still in the funny-money price range for most folks. Slapping one of those in a Touch, even if they could make it fit, would be inordinately expensive. e.g. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150636%201421430849&name=128GB

@NanoGeek
I’m with you. If the home sharing only syncs purchases through iTunes, it will be far less useful, though still useful. My fiancee and I have wasted a few bucks buying the same tracks on two different computers. I wonder if they consider downloads from Audible, for example, purchased content or just another outside audio file?

I will be buying a Zune HD (shortly after release–not day 1 or preorder. Not a Nano right away. Maybe later; maybe not until existing Nano dies.
–John

From what they said, I believe that it will sync everything. But don’t take my word for it.

And a 128GB Touch would have been nice, killing off the Classic in the process. As it stands I doubt we’ll be seeing anything bigger than a 64GB iPhone come out next year. So maybe in two years when my iPhone 3GS is up?

Faster flash access in a new Touch would be nice too. I don’t know about you, but syncing my iPhone still takes too long. Its easy to parallize operations on flash memory, as SSDs have shown, and this would be a nice performance tweak.

Speaking of Flash, I’d love to see Flash/Move streaming added to the Apple TV, so I can watch Hulu, TV.com, ABC.com etc on my TV using the Apple TV. A step like that just might make the thing (slightly more) popular.

And games on the Apple TV would be nice too–along with an app store of course.

Anything about more content sooner (e.g. movies closer to day of DVD release) would have been appreciated.

I’m also wondering about this whole Home thing. Will I be able to synchonize the ENTIRE music catalog between two iTunes libraries on two computers in my house, or will it only synchronize newly purchased stuff from the iTunes STORE? I rip stuff, buy it from Amazon, etc, and I’m kinda wondering if this will ignore all those things.