Product face-offs
Apple Genius - not so smart ?
We got our first chance to take a look at Apple's new line of iPods today, and while the fourth-generation Nanos certainly seem to be an improvement, there are one or two niggling worries that we'd like to see sorted out.
Sam McGeever
Updated: 2008-09-11
Updated: 2008-09-11
A Fair Deal On Exchange Rates?
Until recently, a frequent complaint amongst UK consumers was the seemingly baffling exchange rates offered by US companies offering products for sale in Britain. All too often, lazy corporations would swap the $ for a £ and sell a $800 laptop for £800.
Long before the changing fortunes of the dollar forced companies to see sense, British consumers would frequently ask friends and family in the US to help them out.
It seems that our friends in Europe aren't so lucky, however. Every single price announced by Steve Jobs in California has magically been converted on a one-to-one basis for at least some parts of the European market. So, while the iPod Classic retails for $249 in Pennsylvania, it's also going for €249 in Paris. Seems logical, doesn't it - until you realize that $249 is actually only about €175.
Even if it's cleaned up its act in the UK, Apple still doesn't seem keen to offer a fair deal to its European customers.
Long before the changing fortunes of the dollar forced companies to see sense, British consumers would frequently ask friends and family in the US to help them out.
It seems that our friends in Europe aren't so lucky, however. Every single price announced by Steve Jobs in California has magically been converted on a one-to-one basis for at least some parts of the European market. So, while the iPod Classic retails for $249 in Pennsylvania, it's also going for €249 in Paris. Seems logical, doesn't it - until you realize that $249 is actually only about €175.
Even if it's cleaned up its act in the UK, Apple still doesn't seem keen to offer a fair deal to its European customers.
It's one of the most trumpeted features in the current iPod refresh and, when it works, it's impressive. At a demo we saw in Paris this afternoon, it chose tracks by Robyn, ABBA and Lily Allen to go with the MIKA song we were listening to.
It's easy to see how a high number of people with all four artists in their collection influence the rankings when Genius analyses a new request for complementary tracks.
What's less clear, though, is how much time and effort all of this takes. There have already been some reports that analyzing a large library for the first time can be slow, and today an Apple representative seemed to suggest that the Genius database might take up 8-10% of the space on your iPod.
We don't want to knock an innovative feature, which, as Apple suggests, should help users with big collections listen to their music in new, unexpected ways without relying on complex analyses of the tempo and pitch of different tracks.
Is it really worth it?
The big but, however, is whether devoting 800 MB of your 8 GB Nano is really worth it. Accepting Apple's claim that there is room for 2, 000 average tracks on the smaller version of the Nano means you lose 200 tracks just to make room for Genius.
Given that turning on Shuffle is as easy as shaking your iPod from side to side thanks to the built-in accelerometer, losing a tenth of your music collection just to be able to mix things up from time to time seems like something of a false start.
We haven't a chance to actually test Genius out, and its actual performance may differ from what the Apple rep suggested to us today, but, if Genius really does eat up 10% of our iPod then we'll probably be turning it off for the time being …*
Update: Video
We also managed to grab this little video of the new 4G Nano in action. It's not great quality but you can see how easy the Genius interface is ...
