Macintosh

Letting the iPhone and iPad Off the Leash

November 15th 2010, 06:11pm

It’s the cable to the computer that’s holding Apple’s mobile devices back.  You still need to plug them into a computer for two (or three) reasons: to backup and to sync your music (and to sync your photos).

The iPad, in particular, is has huge potential (I’ll blog soon on my experiences with it) and for some people it could replace their computer altogether.  But the fact that you cannot add music without doing a lengthy sync, nor delete tunes to free up disk space when you are away from your computer is a major limiting factor.  I think Apple could resolve this with with two developments: one is the long rumoured iTunes cloud and the other is Time Machine for iOS.

The iTunes cloud would allow the various (now rather fragmented) iTunes apps concerned with the playback of music and videos, whether on PCs, Macs or iOS devices, do what Spotify already can and sync your music collection over the air.  The Spotify iPhone app lets you see all of your playlists, and you can stream them so long as you have n internet connection – but, crucially, you can also check a box next to each one that you want to be available when you do not have a connection.  When you do this, the music is synced over the air to your device – and if you’re on your home wifi network this can include music in your own collection that Spotify don’t offer.  There’s no reason why Apple shouldn’t offer something like this even if its only to access the music you already own (and a similar solution could be used for viewing your iPhoto collection, with thumbnails viewable over the air and high resolution images for those albums you have checked and synced).

The Apple Time Capsule is the other element that could free their iOS devices from subservience to a PC.  Building Time Machine into iOS would allow devices to do incremental backups – ideally to any AirDisk – and the Time Capsule/AirDisk could also host the storage of the music and photos synced over the air.

If tomorrow’s iTunes announcement (there’s a teaser right now at apple.com) really is The Cloud, then iPhone and iPad world domination won’t be far behind…

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Technology

iTunes’ Identity Crisis

July 21st 2010, 10:07pm

The cloud-based iTunes rumour is still doing the rounds, and besides suiting me better it could be an opportunity for Apple to resolve the question of what iTunes is actually for.  It started out as a music player on the Mac, but as a result of mission creep has become much more.  Meanwhile its music store is an iOS app, the rest of its functions an iPod app; and now iBooks has come along and muddied the waters further. Read the rest of this entry »

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Technology

If Music Be… An All You Can Eat Buffet, Play On

June 1st 2010, 10:06pm

A music download or streaming subscription can give you access to unlimited tunes, but you can never listen to them all and the minute you cancel your subscription they’re gone, so why would you bother?

I used to go into curry houses which offered all you can eat buffets determined to get better value than I’d have had ordering dishes from the menu.  You practically had to winch me out of my chair at the end; I would roll down the street to the nearest bus stop.  Now I prefer buffets even when I serve myself less food than I’d have had from a couple of dishes from the menu because I get to taste lots and eat exactly as much as I like of each dish.  If you try to quantify each transaction the outcome may seem to favour ordering from the menu, but I find a buffet a more enjoyable experience.

My post a couple of days ago about Spotify and iTunes focused on how Spotify has crept onto iTunes’ turf. But the discussion focussed on subscription versus purchasing music, and clarified my thoughts on this. I think Spotify has made it impossible for iTunes to resist branching into subscriptions, and I think the reason why people like subscriptions comes down to two things:

  1. Given that we like to experiment and listen to new music, if the cost of a subscription is less than what we spend on trying out new tracks that ultimately aren’t really “keepers” then a subscription represents good value.
  2. Having a subscription changes the rules.  We no longer have to weigh up whether we think a track is going to be worth buying to listen to it in full.  Subscription listening is about discover and casual listening, and we’ll still buy the tracks we really love.

The former argument is a simple quantifiable choice.  We can research the costs and determine the best value.  But it’s this second argument, about the quality of the experience, that I think will have persuaded Apple.  In their negotiations with mobile providers, they were, after all, insistent on having a special iPhone tariff offered with unlimited data, so iPhone users wouldn’t have to worry about whether they’d already downloaded too much.  They wanted the iPhone experience to be simple, fun, and free from boundaries.  Now they’re the dominant player in music, it’s the newcomers that are making the running, but if Apple doesn’t keep up, then they’ll be the one limiting the music experience.

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Technology

Spotify Can Do What iTunes Can’t

May 30th 2010, 11:05am

Apple have shied away from subscription and streaming for a long time, but Spotify have copied all the best bits of iTunes so it now offers better iPhone syncing than the Apple product.  Will iTunes now copy the best bits of Spotify?  It’s a sibling rivalry – the digital music equivalent of the brothers Milliband…

Subscription services have come and gone as Apple’s iTunes has gone from strength to strength.  But Spotify have developed a compelling service copying iTunes in providing a simple and intuitive client and a very comprehensive music catalogue – and to cap it all, offering it all in a free (advertising supported) option too.  In the “next generation” Spotify service, two major features were added: social and local.

The former is essentially integration with Facebook which pulls in your current friends (if they’ve linked Spotify to their accounts too) and offers familiar features such as feeds and recommendations.  It’s simple, but not only is it more sophisticated than Apple’s limited Facebook/Twitter recommendations options in the iTMS, it has far higher utility because if you have Spotify already you can listen to the full tracks and playlists your friends are subscribing to and recommending with no purchase and no risk (for example, if you’ve got Spotify you could listen to my playlist of commercial tracks from Doctor Who or House, M.D.).  If iTunes wants to get more social, it’s going to be hard to resist the subscription model for much longer.

But the feature that must really have made Apple sit up and take notice is the local feature, the effect of which is to make possible wireless syncing of your iTunes library to iPhone.  This is because Spotify brings in all of your local tracks, and if you have the mobile app (I don’t yet, because I haven’t bothered to sign up for the premium subscription) when you’re on the same wifi network you can make a playlist containing your local tracks (or a mixture of local and Spotify tracks) available for off-line listening. Presto!

Spotify is almost ready to persuade me to give up iTunes altogether.  But there are a few things it lacks (smart playlists, podcasts and audiobooks) and sadly the wifi syncing feature that’s available on the phone isn’t available to other computers on the network (i.e. local files on one network machine cannot be streamed to others).  So Apple has an opportunity here to make a comeback, and here are the three things I want from the next generation iTunes:

  • Streaming/subscription service with social features
  • Let me access music on any of my computers registered to iTunes from anywhere, including streaming it to my iPhone
  • Let me wirelessly sync files to my iPhone for offline listening

And if anyone will (finally) offer me the facility to annotate playlists, I’ll be ecstatic!

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