The phone thingy leaves me completely cold; I don’t own a cellphone, and don’t intend to buy one in the near future. Still, I suppose I should be glad that the market appeared to like it; AAPL even went over the magic $50 mark today for a few minutes.

The iPod nano looks great, even if it’s a little expensive per gigabyte. If I find a suckerbuyer for my 40GB (3G) iPod, I might even switch… given that I use it mostly as a glorified shuffle in the car and in the gym, and I have larger drives elsewhere to keep my main music database, it would make sense. And the “no moving parts” aspect is of course ideal.

(I was puzzled by repeated references to “nano” being a dumb name… until someone told me it refers to a 70s(?) TV show, which I’d never heard of. I wonder if all future “nano” products – and there will be zillions – will be affected by this?)

The third aspect is the new iTunes 5 interface. Dan Wood dislikes it, as do most others who’ve commented. It took me a moment to look beyond the Mail-style splitter control to notice that metal had gone, replaced by Yet Another Different Interface Style.

Personally, I thought the margin-less aspect is positive, and the new gradients aren’t too bad. I never use Mail, so I found the divider-less splitter very strange; although I like to experiment with new UI, this is one thing I won’t try out in my products. (However, users of RBSplitView should note that this is easy to do with it.)

Overall, this reinforces my opinion that Apple is now moving away from a intelligent design approach to UI, towards a more survival of the fittest sort of thing. Each application’s group tries out new UI elements and the ones that survive get incorporated into Interface Builder’s palettes one or two releases down the road. It’s certainly more exciting but also, at times, disconcerting…