Another Apple AAPL -1.12% special event spectacular has come and gone, and once again people are buzzing with what was announced and what wasn’t. Apple is clearly a consumer electronics company, but one that’s highly influential in the music world, and this series of products will influence music more than you might think.
The first significant announcement was pretty much glossed over, and that’s the fact that iTunes Radio now has 20 million users and has served up over a billion songs. Considering that it’s only been a little over a month since the service was introduced (and only in the US at that), and you can see why the service add-on is shaping up to be the monster that Pandora and Spotify feared the most. The prediction here is that by this time next year iTunes Radio will have surpassed the cumulative listeners of both Pandora and Spotify together, and you can be sure that will jeopardize the existence of at least one of these services.
But this was an event centered mainly around hardware, and while the brand new iPads look nice and more powerful than ever, most music production is still done on desktop machines and to a lessor degree, laptops that have become almost as powerful. The new Mac Pro (which will finally be shipping in December) touted at the event will have a deeper impact than most analysts believe, basically because it’s more of a strategic product than almost anything else in the Apple line.
To understand why that is, you have to first understand that Apple rules professional audio and has for some time. There’s plenty of great audio products for the PC, but virtually all pro shops are based around the Mac hardware platform and operating system. This has been the case for more than a decade, despite the higher initial purchase price of the hardware.
That position was in danger of eroding, however, because of the lack of a new generation of Mac Pro that was delayed for way too long, which led many to believe that Apple was abandoning the unit and the market. A lot of pros started to look around for other alternatives in order to hedge their bets as a result, but were stopped from proceeding when the latest Mac Pro was announced in the beginning of the year. The fact that the new Mac Pro is actually about to become a real purchasable product now puts a number of factors in motion.
Most music pros have at least a desktop and a laptop, but it’s not uncommon for many production facilities and studios to have as many as a dozen machines. Not all of these computers will be converted to new Mac Pros, but a good number of the older ones are destined to be replaced just because of the added horsepower and new upgraded features of the newly designed unit. Plus, the fact that the unit is supposed to be dead quiet might even be enough to get a pro to upgrade to keep the ambient noise in the studio to a minimum.
What many don’t understand is that there are big shops in the audio for video space servicing film and television that use hundreds of machines that need as much horsepower as they can get. Apple now not only gets to move more machines into these facilities, but also keeps potential competitors out of the game at the same time.
Then there’s the introduction of OSX Mavericks, which reportedly speeds up older machines so much that they feel like new. Although Apple OS upgrades have been reasonably priced in the past ($20 to $30), Mavericks is free. What this does is immediately take the majority of the user base onto the new operating system all at once. But a new OS giveth and taketh away at the same time. You get the new features of the OS, but it also means that you have to update your other software apps and plugins as a result. Not great for the end user, but good for the App Store bottom line. In the end, the end user wins anyway with up-to-date features and performance on a standardized platform.
But maybe the most significant bit from the event is what you didn’t see, and that was the absence of anything having to do with the iPod. It’s more than likely that the product is at end-of-life, and after all, why shouldn’t it be? People listen to more music than ever while on the go, but it’s now mostly from their phone. Why carry two devices when you only need one? The iPod is a product that will quietly fade out over the next few years, a sad but fitting end to a product that jumpstarted Apple into its current behemoth form. Let’s think good thoughts about the little device that started it all.
