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Apple event: A litany of fail?

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Love, in digital times, means never having to say you’re sorry. All you have to do is fix it in the next release.

That seemed to be the approach Apple took last week during its new products showcase, where most of the announcements were revamps of its existing lineup.

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Some of the new features were clearly new, such as a touch screen on the iPod nano and the Game Center for multi-player games on iPhone and iPod Touch. But a handful of changes could be viewed as a mea culpa of getting it wrong in the earlier iterations. Four potentially fall into the latter category. They are:

Apple TV -- Introduced four years ago, Apple TV ‘has never been a huge hit,’ admitted Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs during his presentation in San Francisco. Its price tag, $229, was ‘too expensive,’ Jobs said. So the latest version of Apple TV is $99. In addition, it’s rental only. That meant no more bulky hard drive storing purchased content.

iPod Shuffle -- In its last version, the Shuffle shrank to the size of a thin USB stick. But it had no navigation buttons, which Jobs admitted ‘people clearly miss.’ The new Shuffle reverts back to the old design, a square lapel pin the size of a postage stamp with a big control button.

iPod Nano -- Apple took out the video camera on the nano, and put it on the larger iPod Touch. The problem with the nano’s camera was that the device was so small (hence, nano) and the lens was placed in such a way that people’s fingers often ended up covering a portion of the image. Oops.

iOS 4.1 -- The first new feature that Jobs highlighted for Apple’s latest mobile operating system? Bug fixes. ‘Proximity sensor bugs, Bluetooth bugs, iPhone 3G performance bugs, all the bugs that we get mails on,’ Jobs said. ‘We think we’ve nailed a lot of them. And we think you’re going to be pretty happy with it.’

‘Nuff said. Can we please move on now?

-- Alex Pham

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