Morning Music Notes – All About Apple

More Details on the Apple iPhone 4S Announcement

Let down by yesterday’s iPhone announcement? Didn’t hear about yesterday’s iPhone announcement? Well, scroll down and check out the PHM summary. On October 14, the new iPhone 5 4S will be available in select countries. It wasn’t the full, revolutionary upgrade to an iPhone 5 that people were hoping for and expecting, but it is essentially a music faster iPhone 4, with a few more bells and whistles. Worth the 16 month wait? Maybe not. I even hear people are protesting outside Wall Street, but that might be unrelated.

In addition to the features mentioned in the post yesterday, there is a new feature that Apple spent a lot of time discussing and developing. This feature is Siri, which is an intelligent assistant. You can verbally give instructions, such as setting reminders, having text messages read to you and even verbally reply to them. I can foresee many disastrous verbal drunk texts being sent.

Check out a 5 minute propaganda video of the new features, including the aforementioned Siri assistant.

[youtube 0DVciEgSozo]

What the Apple iPhone 4S Means for Music

Another major announcement, as shown in the video above, is the iCloud. This stores your music, photos, apps, etc. It allows you to wirelessly sync your phone to your computer – look mom, no wires!

In addition to the stats listed yesterday, Apple also mentioned that 1/3 of music sold on iTunes is purchased on an iOS device.

A little more information about the iTunes Match program, as part of the iCloud streaming, was provided. It will be available at the end of October. There are 20 million songs in the iTunes library, making it the largest in the world (they haven’t seen my external hard drives, have they?). What iTunes Match will do is check your library versus theirs, and upload all of the songs that match to their (well, your) iCloud. What is not found, tough shit they will stream. The streaming is pretty interesting, and this is the first time this was mentioned for a non-matched song. The cost is $25 a year.

Apple also announced a bunch of iPod stuff. Are you sick of reading about Apple, or are you bouncing in your seat with excitement? The nano got a makeover, and a price drop. There’s a new white iPod touch, and they have dropped in price – $199 8GB, $299 32GB $399: 4GB. The useless Shuffle is still being made. No word about the ‘normal’ iPod.

In Other News

Nothing else happened in the world yesterday. Sorry, folks.