layout: post title: iPod Photo Thoughts created: 1099002233 categories:

• Music
• Movie
• Mac

Marc asked:

Will one of you Apple slave - I mean customers - please tell me why you'd want to carry around photos that you didn't take with your iPod in your iPod?

And I wrote a long series of comments:

Because it's a firmware upgrade and a few license agreements with Hollywood studios away from syncing for-pay video content (iTunes already shows videos cross-platform, and QT got revved along with the iTunes update).

Because Kate loves the security of carrying around a backup of all her music AND photos.

Because (wishful thinking?) it's another firmware upgrade away from being able to plug in firewire to be able to capture/transfer photos directly to iPod (lenses are expensive, leave it up to the people who are good at those).

Because some people don't have computers at home...but they still have an iPod and now, gee willikers, it does photos, too (OK, this one is a stretch...but I seem to see a lot of a-typical iPod users, and have one/two anecdotal stories of people buying computers to go with their iPod...and both were PCs)

Michael Gartenberg seems to agree with my reasoning for no video (yet) -- that the market just isn't ready. There isn't enough "consumer" content (which to me means legal video downloads).

Russell Beattie thinks Steve Jobs is wrong about mobile video -- based on his experience of the phone/mobile market. Sorry, I don't buy it. Postage stamp sized video is not something that people will pay a bunch for. But here's my use case.

Apple gets legal downloads. Lots of free stuff (music videos, movie trailers, commercials, etc.) that is "small" -- plays OK on the little screen. The legal downloads are movies, that take up about 1GB, give or take (you can probably get good quality at less than that, especially if there are some fancy new codecs). That means 60 movies at once, but more likely a half-dozen at most. People could watch them on the little LCD. But, since the iPod Photo does video-out, people watch it where they like watching videos -- on a TV.

Graham (I think it was Graham -- it's anonymous) did a long rant about the new ipods over in the forums as well.

But why are people so upset? If there are better solutions...then they'll win. Me? I might buy one. Actually, more likely as I said above, I'd buy one for Kate. And hope for firmware upgrades :P