[HIB]Apple's elephant in the cloud

Apple has an obsession with elegance. Just look at the line-up at yesterday's annual orgy of consumer desire. A new iPod Nano that looks like a tiny, animated, touch-sensitive, acid-drenched postage stamp - without losing a microgram of cool. An iPod Touch that generates and displays video, plays games and audio, and runs a kazillion apps, all with fewer buttons than a Mark 1 Walkman. An Apple TV that hooks together HD movies, Internet still and moving pictures, hewn from a minimalist block of ebony-black plastic. On this count, Apple still has it - and has it with enough insouciance to carry off a pricing structure only explicable if they have their flash memory hand-carved by octogenarian Japanese craftsmen using unicorn horn instead of silicon. Not to mention a dollar-to-pound conversion rate uncontaminated by actual forex. Yet there's one place where the whole business falls down. iTunes, now in its tenth incarnation, is the prog rock wig-out at the techno rave. And like the LPs of some of the 70s more behemothian bands, each new version is more overblown than the last. If iTunes was a record, by now it would be a quad album in a gatefold sleeve, with lyrics written in faux runescript and a free Roger Dean poster showing space-going whales dancing a quadrille around Planet Pomp. It is the app that taste forgot.

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