It's that time of the year again (nearly Christmas), and Apple have released their new bits of digital crack onto an unsuspecting population. There's a new iPod, a new iMac, and a remote thingie. This is what is going to happen with all three of these products (Note my use of the absolute ("will") here, as I don't want to give the impression I'm just guessing here).

The iPod

The iPod does video now. You can buy music videos and tv shows off the iTunes Music/Video store. I predict that no-one will actually buy these music videos and tv shows, but the pirates (God bless their souls), will stop ripping TV shows in divX, xVid, or DivX ;), or any combination of smilies and uppercase letters, and will start using the much more sensibly names H.264 codec. I'm now going to invent the word "TorrentPodCasting", which will describe the process of downloading the latest episode of Lost automatically from your favourite tracker, and then having it automatically transferred across to your iPod, where it will play with no further fuss. You can then take your iPod, and once you've bought the dock (another expense!), you can use the AV out to watch your videos on any random TV. In summary: This is going to be good for piracy.

The iMac

It's got a camera built in now, and has the remote thingie. We're watching the Mac turn into the media center PC. This doesn't really fit in too well with (what I thought) was the Mac strategy of decentralising the whole media thing, and using dedicated devices (like the Airport Express) to stream audio/video to your already quite expensive AV equipment, with the $200 speaker cables. It's a nice upgrade to the hardware however, and I've just got to convince someone who is holding some large purse-strings to buy one for me (for work, or uni or whatever). In summary: More of the same iMac, but I hope they're not going to make the Mac a media center PC (The network is the computer!).

The Remote thingie

I hope to god this thing doesn't sell well. I mean, it's a bloody infra-red remote (by the looks of the red bit at the end), that happens to look a bit like the shuffle. On the upside, at least it's got a replaceable battery. In summary: What a waste of effort! I was hoping for a lightweight iPod, which actually has a little display in it. I love this bit from the site - "Apple designers simplified the average remote from 60 buttons you'll never use to just the six buttons you need". It took more than one designer to decide to do that? It looks eerily like a really simple DVD-style remote. In summary: I don't even have an infra-red port to use the remote with!