So, Steve's made a new set of toys everyone will want. And unlike a lot of his recent devices he's had his enslaved time travelers tell him about made, I actually like these.

Let's go from the ground-up, starting with the Shuffle, shall we?

I'll say it in one word; Buttons. The buttonless Shuffle had to be one of the stupidest things I'd seen in a long while. It's good to see buttons return to the Shuffle in what seems like a step back a generation or two. On top of this, it's now 2GB, which means it can actually hold a few albums, and it's only $50. I may pick one of these up if work pays more than last year as a "throwaround" MP3 player I don't have sentimental value towards/have to worry about because of the price for the gym, vacations, public transit, etc.

Next up, the new Nano. Now it's basically a Shuffle with a multi-touch screen and about 4-8 times the space for about three or four times the price. Will multi-touch be clumsy to use on that small a display? Probably. Granted that's the kind of thing you work out in testing, but considering the iPhone 4 wireless debacle, Apple's testing seems a little lackluster nowadays.

The Classic is unchanged. $250 buys you 160GB of HDD-stored stuff on a traditional clickwheel with a traditional footprint.

The Touch though has finally become the flagship model any intelligent company would make it. There isn't anything that for no well-explained reason they don't put on their higher-end MP3 player, or soem feature that they stupidly put on a lower-end model but left off this one this time. No longer does it lack a camera a Nano has(The Nano now lacks it, and it can do photos), and on top of that, it now has videoconferencing, I assume via Skype or some other VoIP service, and it has the awesome retina display. When I say it like that it sounds like propaganda, but when I say it like this; "It has the awesome display the iPhone 4 has that is high enough resolution in a small enough space that it's near-indistinguishable from real-life images unless you zoom too far in and basically shove it onto your eye" you see where I'm coning from(Yes I've tested that myself, save for the eye-pressing, I'm not eating a biased first-party take), but that's really long and annoying. It also has Game Center, whatever that is, the keynote will likely elaborate on that, and it's cheaper. Once I finish revamping my recording setup while I have my employee discount, there's a good chance I'll be picking one of these up.

The iHome was also updated, but I don't really care, as the iHome seems to do the same thing as a stereo controller, which my father has, and a laptop, which I have, so I don't have much use for.