Gruber on the new Apple products

John"Daring Fireball" Gruber has a good list of observations about yesterday’s announcements from Apple. A few comments on his comments:

• The combination of what seems to be a smaller click-wheel with the wider screen “makes it look as though the width and height of the iPod have grown” – I agree. When I saw the first spy shots, I was sure we were in for a bigger, heavier iPod. Hopefully Apple will clean this up in the next revision.

• “The remote attaches to the new iMac by magnetism.” A small sign of the times. Nobody would have embedded a magnet in the case of a computer ten years ago when floppies and Zip disks were floating around everywhere.

• “new iMacs no longer ship with built-in modems.” Excellent. I wonder when they’ll drop them from the PowerBooks and save us all a few grams?

• "…while Apple has a reputation for making spectacular announcements, their long-term strategy for a media entertainment platform is unfolding incrementally." Yes. Which is why I don’t think it’s such a big deal that there’s no TV tuner in the new iMac. Apple gets to test the waters with an almost trivial enhancement (a bluetooth remote and software), and if consumer response is good they can add PVR features to later models and make it seem like a natural evolution.

• “320 * 240 resolution … crummy low-res format…” True. Then again, that didn’t stop the VCD – which enhances the crummy low resolution with crummy compression artifacts.