San Francisco - Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled an upgraded line of iPod media players Tuesday, as well as a deal to sell NBC Universal TV shows and movies through the iTunes store. But investors had hoped for more dramatic product announcements ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season and sent the company's shares down almost 5 per cent in Nasdaq trading to 150.70 dollars.
Jobs started the highly anticipated presentation in San Francisco by referring to widespread rumours of his poor health, flashing a message on the screen that "reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
The quote also referred to an obituary for him that was mistakenly distributed last week by Bloomberg News.
His product upgrades include two new iPod Nano models that Jobs said were the thinnest iPods Apple had ever made and cost 149 dollars for the one with 8 gigabytes of memory, with a 16-gigabyte version for 199 dollars.
The iPod Touch, which is similar to the iPhone but without cellphone functionality, was also upgraded and will now sell for 229 dollars for an 8-gigabyte device, 299 dollars for a 16-gigabyte version and 399 dollars for a 32-gigabyte model.
The iPod classic also got an upgrade with a new, thinner 120- gigabyte version selling for 249 dollars.
Jobs also announced a new version of iTunes, that includes a so- called "Genius" button that automatically creates playlists based on the song users are listening to at the time.
He boasted about the return of NBC to iTunes a year after the TV network quit the download site in a dispute with Apple over pricing. Jobs said that iTunes now offers more than 8.5 million songs, 125,000 podcasts, 30,000 TV shows, 2,600 movies and 3,000 software applications for iPhone and iPod Touch owners.
Jobs said that iPod and iPhone users have downloaded 100 million copies of the software applications in Apple's recently launched App Store.
