exploremusic

Every September, Steve Jobs picks out a clean black turtleneck and trots onstage in San Francisco to talk about music—specifically MP3 players, online music stores and whatever else Apple has planned music-wise for the Christmas season.

I can’t say I was surprised at a lot of what was revealed today because, well, let’s face it:  there’s not much more you can do with the concept of the MP3 player before it turns into something else.  The best anyone—including Apple—can do at this point is refurbish the product line with a little more functionality, even if those functions will be fairly useless for most people.

I won’t go into the OS updates because unless you’re a tech geek or an Apple fanboy, you won’t care much about bug fixes and the update to the iPad OS.  If you must, though, this is a good read.

On the music end of things, Stevie J introduced Airplay, which will make mix-and-match whole-home music systems easier than ever to construct.  iTunes streaming to third-party devices?  Absolutely.   But streaming iTunes content from the cloud?  Not yet.

There’s a new iPod Shuffle.  Thankfully, Apple has figured out that electronic devices meant for consumers should have buttons to control them. At least these new ones have some buttons to press.

The new iPod nano is much different.    No more click wheel.  Instead, it has a multi-touch screen and an all-new shape. 

The iPod Touch gets front- and back-facing cameras, as expected.  It’s also much smaller than even an iPhone 4—and much faster, too. 

And the iPod Classic wasn’t killed.  Apparently, people still buy these things in sufficient amounts for Apple to keep making the things.  It remains basically untouched.

Meanwhile, iTunes moves to version 10.  The biggest thing is that they’ve changed the logo.  No more musical notes over a CD.  The CD is gone.  The CD is dead.  Now it’s just two notes over a shiny blue circle that’s definitely NOT a CD.  iTunes 10 also includes a social networking feature called Ping—which, as far as I can tell at this point, will be completely useless.  Do we really need ANOTHER social network to worry about?  And did iTunes need to get even MORE big and bloated?  Gimme iTunes Lite!  Please!

There’s more—like the new Apple TV (which admittedly looks pretty cool) and the fact that Chris Martin of Coldplay did a little set at the end of it all—so if you want to go a little deeper, try this.