Apple puts Wi-Fi in iPod Touch

Steve Jobs took the stage at San Francisco's Moscone West expo center promptly at 10 a.m. Wednesday morning to thunderous applause from the crowd.

"Today we're here to talk about music," Jobs said.

[Slideshow: Apple unveils new iPods | Video: Apple's new and updated iPods ]

"We've distributed 600 million copies of iTunes so far, and customers have bought and downloaded over 3 billion songs from iTunes. iTunes is the number one online music store in every single one of the 22 countries it operates in," he explained. "We started with just 200,000 songs, and we have over 6 million songs in every single one of those stores."

Jobs told the audience that the iTunes Store -- now the No. 3 music retailer in the United States behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy -- carries more than 550 television shows and has sold 95 million TV shows to date. The service features links to more than 125,000 podcasts, with more than 25,000 of them featuring video.

"This last stat I want to share with you blew my mind. In the U.S., of all the music releases in 2006, 32 percent were digital-only releases," said Jobs. "They were not released on a CD. Wow. Look how far we've come: A third of the music released in this country was not on a CD.

"So that gives you a feeling for how far we've coming in the last five years in the digital music revolution."

Jobs revealed that Apple plans to release a new version of iTunes on Wednesday evening that will support the products that are being announced Wednesday -- and the biggest new feature in iTunes will be ring tone support for the iPhone.

"We're going to do ring tones in our own special way," explained Jobs.

"And, of course, these are for the iPhone. And what we want is rather than having someone make ring tones for us, we're going to make a custom ring tone maker. We're going to build it into iTunes, and you can make ring tones from many songs available on iTunes, including some songs you've already purchased."

Jobs compared iTunes ring tones to the competition, which cost up to $2.49. "Our ring tones, make 'em yourself, you pay another 99 cents to make the ring tone," he said.

Jobs demonstrated how the new feature works using Aretha Franklin's classic soul number "Respect." All of the songs on the iTunes Store that are "ringtonable" will feature a bell icon column in the music list. You click on the bell, the ring tone maker pops up, and you can click and drag to find the part of the song you want to use as a ring tone. iTunes creates a new file in the ring tone folder, and a new tab in Tunes then lets you decide what to sync to your iPhone.

Jobs played "Give Peace a Chance," then added, "That's [for] when NBC calls," referring to Apple's recent dispute with the TV network, which said it will end its partnership to publish shows on the iTunes Store in December.

iPod  news

Jobs said that Apple has sold 110 million iPods to date. "The place when the sales curve is strongest is the holiday season," said Jobs. "We're approaching the holiday 2007 season, and we want to get ready.

"Today we're going to refresh or replace every product in the lineup," said Jobs.