Steve Jobs live — Apple's "The beat goes on" special event
Apple's "The beat goes on" special event — 9:20AM PDT - They kept everyone outside a little longer than we would have liked, but they're finally admitting. This is the Moscone West — we're assuming the huge hall Steve launched the iPhone in back in January.
Context & Ripple Effects
Engadget is live-blogging another Steve Jobs keynote, continuing a format it used at the Macworld 2006 keynote, and the venue itself carries weight: this is Moscone West, the hall where Jobs launched the iPhone in January 2007. The run-up gave the event stakes — iSuppli reported on September 4 that the iPhone outsold every other U.S. smartphone model in July, and on August 31 Apple confirmed it would stop selling NBC television shows for the upcoming season.
What emerges is a broad refresh rather than one hero product: the iPod touch, a reshaped nano, a hard-drive iPod classic, and a Wi-Fi iTunes Music Store, plus a $200 iPhone price cut. The pickup is unusually wide — Apple, Gizmodo, InfoWorld, Silicon Alley Insider, GigaOM and Read/WriteWeb all carried announcements from the single morning — and reader reaction to the price cut turned negative almost immediately.
First-order effects
- Apple now sells a touchscreen iPod with no phone attached, extending the iPhone's interface to buyers outside the AT&T exclusivity and giving the new Wi-Fi iTunes Store a carrier-free device to live on.
- The $200 iPhone price cut lands directly on customers who bought within the previous months; GigaOM is already publishing instructions for getting money back, and the confirmed reader reaction is that buyers feel shortchanged.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft cut Zune pricing in the same window, per InfoWorld, converting Apple's iPod refresh into an immediate portable-player price war.
- The Wi-Fi store lets the device buy music without a computer or a carrier in the loop — Silicon Alley Insider frames it explicitly as a snub of AT&T — moving distribution leverage over digital-music sales toward Apple.
Third-order effects
- With the classic, nano and touch all rebuilt in one morning, the iPod line is being restructured around the touchscreen-and-onboard-store architecture the iPhone introduced, making the handheld a retail channel as much as a playback device.
- Repricing a flagship mid-cycle creates a recurring customer-relations problem: if the pattern holds, every major Apple hardware move now carries a public backlash-management cost alongside its market effect, and content partners like NBC are already testing the limits of Apple's store control.
The trend: Apple is collapsing the boundary between its iPod and iPhone lines around shared touchscreen hardware and on-device purchasing, forcing rivals like Microsoft into reactive pricing and straining both carriers and content partners.