Where to with Apple?

Next week Apple conducts another of its well orchestrated product events. For the last few weeks the Apple fan sites have been speculating what might be in store for key product lines. Top of the list seems to be (yet another) iPhone model and (maybe) (yet another) iPad model. As the owner / operator of this and another CD ripping service neither new products would make much of a difference to us. But what would make a difference to our clients?

First, if Apple added the massively popular BBC iPlayer to its Apple TV product. Several of our clients have Apple TVs and they generally love them, the ability to stream music around the house, the sharing function for photos and your own movies, even buying films from iTunes Music Store, all are great, but no BBC? It would be great if this, for a UK audience, glaring omission were to be corrected.

Second, and this would have impact on us all, is better quality music. When we started out data storage space was at a premium so the ability to store decent(ish) sound in small files was important. Today even a massive hard drive is a modest price and our clients are spending more on high quality music players such as Sonos so how about a better sounding music file? Apple could lead the way with top quality music.

Third I'd like Apple to reach out and embrace other devices. In my opinion the iPod (and with it the iPod Touch and iPhone) are the best portable music players but I think its time for Apple to get real and acknowledge that many people have other devices. Would it really hurt for Apple to support, say, Android based players without having to resort to third party software?