Today’s Apple event was solid. Not overwhelming, but also very little to complain about.

• Shuffle: I’m disappointed, but not astonished, that its price hasn’t been dropped. I don’t care for the new colors; if I wanted one, I’d prefer the old selection. Apple must have an extraordinary profit margin on these by now, as they’ve introduced virtually the same models about a year ago, when Flash memory prices were significantly higher. I was hoping for $49, but even a minimal drop from $79 would have made me happy. Then again, there’s refurbished ones for $49, which isn’t too bad.
• Nano: Strong. 4024 hours of battery life is nice, though most people I know prefer to sync it once a day anyway, in which case it only helps for video playback. (Keep in mind the inevitable capacity decrease after a year or two, however.) Update: Actually, the 40 hours are for the 160 GB iPod classic, not the nanos. However, the same point applies – just not to the nanos, which have the sweet spot of 24 hours.
• Classic: In sharp disagreement with someone whose name I can’t reveal, I’m happy about this new moniker for, well, the “classic” iPods. I used to refer to them as “regular”s, which always struck me as a subpar name. What Apple chose won’t win prizes for creativity, but at least everyone will associate it correctly.
• Touch: What’s up with no Mail, and not even the oh-so-important Stock Ticker? The Springboard looks so empty it’s stupid, and that Mobile iTunes is one of the worst designs Apple has done in years. (Yes, I get it. An arrow. For downloads. What was wrong with the cute lil’ green shopping bag?)
• Touch vs. Classic: That they kept Classic alive is an unusual move for Jobs 2.0-era simple-lineup Apple, but makes sense for a simple reason: Touch doesn’t offer anywhere near the capacity some people require (whereas Classic delivers), and Classic’s hard drive wouldn’t work well at all for the iPhone-esque Touch UI. As Gruber stressed:
  

  A cold boot takes about 20 seconds. (Sleep/wake is effectively instantaneous — far faster than any Mac.)

  [..]

  Everything is very fast, very responsive. When you drag something — whether it’s the slider button to unlock the phone, a zoomed-in photograph, or a web page — the drag keeps up with your finger. I haven’t found a single element of the iPhone UI that doesn’t feel super-snappy. The whole thing feels very realistic.

  Update: Real-time dragging is such a priority that if the iPhone can’t keep up and render what you’re dragging in real-time, it won’t even try, and you get a checkerboard pattern reminiscent of a transparent Photoshop layer until it catches up (typically, an instant later). I.e. iPhone prioritizes drag animation over the rendering of the contents; feel over appearance.

  Flash memory plays a large role in that “responsiveness”, namely through extremely low seek times. Having the hard drive spin up, seek, park, unpark, seek would completely ruin the experience. So, as long as Flash memory in capacities of, say, 64 or 128 GB isn’t available in an affordable fashion, merging the two lines won’t be an option. Going by Samsung’s rough estimates from earlier this year, even the former would cost Apple about $480 for the memory alone; hardly doable when an 80 GB hard drive equivalent can be had for $299 for the entire piece. Perhaps in a year, or two, or three.

  (Sure, one could provide 1 GB of Flash combined with a hard drive, but then you’d still have a rather bulky device compared to the Touch.)

• iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store: Awesome! I know a lot of people have been asking for this. Nice. One can only hope Apple waited this long so they could make for a great implementation, particularly with regard to the now-required two-way syncing… The Starbucks announcement is a clever idea as well, but… did anyone say Tim Hortons? Also, I’m sure the “LOL V CAST” suits at Verizon are none too happy about this: with V CAST, songs are $1.99 unless purchased on the computer; with iTWFMS (heh), songs are still the same 99 cents. ‘Tis a big difference: Verizon chooses to discourage people to fully use their phones’ capabilities.
• Ringtones: 99 cents. Family-friendly words cannot describe this. Being able to select your own portion of the song is great, though the idea doesn’t take a genius to come up with. Having to pay this much is ludricous, and ought to be boycotted. The sad part? People have been spending much more than this on ringtones for years! If I ever do get an iPhone, there’s always manually copying the file over. Fission. ’nuff said.
• iPhone price break: they removed the 4 GB model, and stressed customers preferred the 8 GB. So far, so good. But they cut the price by $200, which is unusual of Apple and downright suspicious. Were they planning this all along in anticipation of the holiday season, deliberately screwing over early adopters (it’s only been a little over two months!)? Did the models not sell as well as they had hoped? Or did they sell far better than they had anticipated, thus causing component pricing to decrease more rapidly? Finally, perhaps it’s simply that they sensed too much criticism from the press for relatively high pricing.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the new iPod line-up. The ringtone pricing struck a nerve particularly because I don’t expect it to ever go down and because you are effectively advertising a song, so you should be getting money, not having to pay almost 2 dollars worth of it, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. Perhaps most surprising about this event was the amount of information we previously had thanks to rumors, particularly with regard to the new nano’s format, dimensions and especially user interface.

Whichever the reason or combination thereof for the iPhone’s drastic price change, the iPods and iPhone combined should make for a terrific holiday quarter.