APPLE-OOZA: JOBS BREAKS OUT THE NEW GOODIES

Wednesday morning in San Francisco, the posse from Cupertino broke out their next-gen line of iPods, unveiled the extremely promising iTunes LP (which had been codenamed Cocktail) and, last but not least, put the spotlight on a refurbished, slimline Steve Jobs.

The Apple CEO made his return "looking frail, speaking quietly, with a scratchy voice," according to the Wall Street Journal. In a rare moment of candor, accompanied by an unmistakable show of emotion, Jobs revealed that he'd received the liver of someone in his 20s who'd died in a car accident, and urged the crowd to become organ donors, noting with a rueful laugh that he wouldn’t be here without that aforementioned donor.

Gaunt but animated, Jobs personally introduced the iTunes 9 app, which adds such features as iTunes LP (with initial titles ranging from Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited to Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me), Home Sharing and iTunes Extras for certain movies.

What rumored moves didn’t pan out? Well, no Beatles—not that there was ever a snowball’s chance in hell of Apple Corps cannibalizing or shifting the focus from its own massive rollout of physical product—no killing off of the iPod classic, and no shift in primary focus to the iPod touch.

The featured iPod nano gets a video camera, mic, speaker, pedometer and built-in FM radio with tagging. The nano line comes in 8GB ($149) and 16GB ($179) configurations. The 8GB touch, which Apple bills as “a great pocket computer, a great game player and access to Apple's revolutionary App Store,” will now set you back just $199—a $100 price drop—with the 32GB model at $299 and the 64GB at $399. The classic comes in at a beefy 160GB for $249. The lowest-priced shuffle, a 2GB, is down to $59, while the 4GB flash player goes for $79.

Less glitzy upgrades included an updated iPhone OS (to 3.1) and cheaper, $1.29 ringtones. Among the spruce-ups, Digital Music News points out, users can now manage their apps directly within iTunes, and even consider app recommendations through an expanded Genius engine. When you do the upgrade, you’ll see Genius in the taskbar, updating data from your library. Cool.