For what may the first time, I was right: there were no great surprises in any of Apple's annoucements today.
They have announced colour screens for all white iPods - but not for the iPod mini - meaning the "iPod Photo" brand is being amalgamated into the rest of the line. Prices are dropping too: 20GB iPods will now cost £209, and 60GB iPods come in at £299.
They've also dropped the price of 1GB Shuffle by a tenner to £89, and announced iTunes 4.9, which will let users submit their own podcasts.
I've just got off the phone with Stan Ng, the director of iPod product marketing worldwide, who told me with some bravado that "We're making podcasting mainstream today".
With Grokster fresh in everyone's minds, I also asked him how iTunes might cope with someone putting copyrighted material up in a podcast. "We care significantly about copyright infringement on podcasts, and material that's inappropriate," he said. Apparently Apple will employ a team of workers to vet podcasts for such material, though he said that "because podcasting has been such a grassroots phenomenon, we didn't want to enforce a strict editorial policy". We'll have to wait and see what "offensive" counts as - especially since the podcasting store will be the same across the world (and freedoms of speech vary from nation to nation).
When I asked him whether the drop in Shuffle prices was because Apple was finding it hard to keep up consistent sales of the unit, he skirted the issue and said that "Shuffle has been a great success".
All in all, its pretty much what we expected.
