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I’m a big Apple nerd. I was always a PC guy until I won a free Mac Mini about 5 years ago, and I’ve been a convert ever since. I *love* my iPhone– seriously, it’s kind of sad how much it’s changed my life and how much I rely on it now, but I feel like the Apple event today was, to quote a Gizmodo commenter, “pretty meh-tastic“.

Apple is a company that loves to throw around hyperbolic adjectives like “magical”, “revolutionary”, and “amazing” whenever they announce a new product or service. Frankly, in my opinion, they’ve come pretty close to living up to a lot of the hype, at least with certain products. Today? Not so much. Given that Apple was live-streaming this event (something they NEVER do, you usually have to wait awhile to watch keynotes), you would have thought that they were announcing the iMidas, which will turn any available matter in to gold. Instead, we get a neutered Apple TV, an absurd pricing scheme for iTunes TV/movie rentals, delayed iOS 4 on the iPad, iTunes 10 with some very vague social network integration, HDR photos, and some updated iPods.

Let’s start with the Apple TV, which was what I was most excited about. There’s no local storage, it again locks you in to Apple’s walled garden (not surprising, but given no mention of USB connectivity or local storage = no homebrew software like Plex or Boxee = no MKV/AVI), and it only does 720p. Apple’s argument is that 720p allows for better compromise between quality and bandwidth. You know what would fix that, Apple? A freakin’ hard drive. Seriously, 2TB hard drives are under $100. C’mon. I do give them points for inclusion of Netflix, and the $100 price point. If this is the best Apple has to offer, I think GoogleTV might end up being a better choice. Since 99% of my content is MKV or AVI, I’d probably get a WD TV before I’d buy an Apple TV.

On to the rentals. $.99 for a -single- TV show and $4.99 for a movie? Are you kidding me? I can rent bluray movies from Redbox for $1.50 each, get virtually unlimited movies from Netflix for less than $10 a month, and TV shows for free on Hulu (or just torrent the damn things. Hell, you could buy entire seasons of some shows on DVD for less than what Apple would charge to rent a full season of episodes). I think this is a huge ripoff, and can say without hesitation that I will never, ever pay for a TV or movie rental through iTunes. The only thing I can give Apple props for here is securing rights to rent the movie the same day it hits DVD, which is something Netflix capitulated on when the studios put their collective boots on Netflix’s neck. I’m not fully blaming Apple for the pricing, because I have no doubt that a lot of it was dictated by studios and television executives.

I don’t own an iPad, and won’t buy one until at least version 2 (if at all). If I were an iPad owner, I’d be pretty peeved that they originally said iOS4 would come in September, and now are saying November. The only upside is that you can jailbreak it, assuming you haven’t upgraded to 3.2.2 (which offered nothing in the way of enhancements, but merely patched the PDF exploit used to jailbreak iOS).

Yet another version of iTunes, which means that about 3 months after it hits they’ll release an iOS version that -requires- iTunes 10 in order to install (nobody does forced obsolescence like Apple!). I didn’t get to watch much of this part of the keynote, so I’m still not entirely clear about the point of Ping. I used to see a lot of people tweet what song they were listening to. I don’t see that much any more. I don’t think that a music based social network offers anything more compelling (at least overall) than Twitter or Facebook offer. I suppose time will tell.

HDR photos are kind of neat. I think they will work best for outdoor shots, and should provide a new angle for the notoriously bad cell phone cameras (not saying the iPhone camera is bad, just cell phone cameras in general). Then again, I think HDR is kind of a fad, and frankly I’ve seen some truly awful HDR images. Hopefully they keep the effect minimalistic. I do like the sample pictures they showed. Is it sad that this was the most exciting part of the keynote for me?

The iPod shuffle looks exactly like the old one before they removed the buttons, maybe a bit smaller. Big yawn there. I thought the design with no buttons was stupid, anyway. Touchscreen nano seems overly complicated, but it’s neat if you’re in to that sort of thing, I guess. Adding cameras to the iPod Touch was an inevitability, and the only reason it didn’t happen before now was to make sure no sales were siphoned off from the iPhone. The next version of the iPad will have a camera, too. FaceTime will reign supreme for video calling on mobile devices, unless Apple refuses to open it to other manufacturers. If they don’t, a multi-platform alternative will come along and take away Apple’s thunder. You read it here first, folks (unless you already read it somewhere else… in which case, you read it here just now).

Let’s hope the next Apple event really brings the jam, because today fell pretty flat.