*scottstuff*

Think Secret, apparently undeterred by Apple’s ongoing lawsuit against them, claims that Apple will officially announce Tiger, the next release of OS X, on April 1st, and start shipping the upgrade in the middle of the month. Apple is also expected to upgrade their current iMac G5s and eMacs in the same timeframe.

The Register has a blip today mentioning that the PowerBook G5 will apparently use HyperTransport. The story that they post is a bit dubious, but they seem fairly convinced that Apple is using HyperTransport in the new PowerBook. This isn’t surprising, because the PowerMac G5 and iMac G5 use HT to tie Apple’s custom northbridge to the rest of the system, but there was no real reason to believe that Apple’s laptops would use the same bus technology as their desktops. Laptops have a lot of special needs, and what works for desktop systems doesn’t always work well on laptops.

Hopefully this suggests that Apple is getting closer to releasing G5-based laptops. Personally, I’m guessing they’ll start to show up around August or September, but that’s a complete guess.

Wow, Mac Rumors just pointed out that Apple has already dropped the prices on some of their Mac mini upgrades. The 1 GB RAM upgrade option dropped from $425 to $325, the hard drive upgrade on the 1.25 GHz model dropped from $90 to $50, and the Bluetooth+802.11g upgrade dropped from somewhere around $130 to $99. In addition, the optional DVD writer was listed as a 4x drive last week, while now it’s explicitly an 8x drive.

So, I’ve been thinking about the new Mac mini. I could definitely use a couple new computers at home, and I’d be happiest with new Macs. They’d fit in well with my Powerbook and our dying old iMac. The Mac mini is certainly cheaper then older models, but the pricing is kind of deceptive. Yeah, you can get a model for $499, but by the time you bump the hard drive up to 80 MB, add a DVD burner, and add a reasonable amount of (third-party) memory, it’s pushing $1,000 all of a sudden. More specifically:

• Mac mini, 1.43 GHz/80 GB model: $599
• upgrade to Superdrive: $100
• add keyboard: $29 (Apple total: $728)
• 1 GB of Mac mini RAM from Crucial: $226.99

I’m sure I could get the memory for a few bucks less elsewhere, but I’ve had good luck with Crucial in the past, and I’d rather not monkey around with the RAM if I can avoid it. The initial rumors were that the Mac mini’s RAM wasn’t user-upgradeable; now it looks like it’s just sort of not recommended. It doesn’t require any special tools at the very least.

So, for $1,000, I can have a Mac with around 3x the CPU power of my aging PowerBook, enough RAM to do a bit of photo editing now and then, and a bit of disk space. I’d reuse the 22” CRT sitting on my desk at home and a Logitech optical mouse that I already own.

The problem is that I can’t afford a new Mac and a new Treo 650. Fortunately, no one seems eager to sell me a GSM Treo 650 any time soon, but sooner or later, Cingular is going to announce pricing, and I’m going to have to decide what I’m going to do about it. If they’d been shipping it 3 months ago, I probably would have ordered right off the bat, but its lack of memory and WiFi makes it look less enticing every month.

Oh, well–I should really wait until taxes are done this year before ordering any new hardware anyway.

Apple announced a handful of product upgrades and price cuts today, including:

• Faster Xserves, now standard with 1 GB RAM and available with 2.3 GHz CPUs.
• Lower prices on all of their LCD displays, including their monster 30” model.
• Xsan, their long-delayed shared-disk filesystem (like GFS on Linux) is finally shipping.

Taken as a set, that’s a fairly impressive number of announcements from Apple. They didn’t make many changes to their computer lineup in the second half of 2004, which makes today’s announcements a bit more noteworthy. Especially when you consider that MWSF is happening next week, and Apple traditionally uses the keynote at MWSF to announce a pile of new products. Given that, today’s announcements suggest that Apple is going to be busy next week–if they were short of new things to talk about, then they’d have kept the Xserve announcements for a week and used them for keynote filler.

So, enquiring minds want to know, what is Apple going to announce next week? So far, the rumor mill has given us 4 items:

• iLife 2005, including a new iMovie with HD abilities and upgrades to the rest of their $50 home media tool pack. iMovie is the oldest of their iTools, and has always been kind of flaky for me; hopefully this will be the big upgrade that its been needing.
• iWork. No one’s completely sure what this will include, besides an upgrade to their Keynote presentation software, but most rumors feature a program named “Pages” or “Notes”; presumably a word processor. There are also rumors of some sort of Keynote-companion program, maybe a simple drawing/sketch program? This is supposed to replace Apple’s ancient AppleWorks package, which hasn’t been updated in years, but none of the rumors mention a spreadsheet, without which iWork won’t be very useful.
• The “headless iMac.” Thinksecret swears up and down that Apple will finally be selling a cheap ($500-$600) computer without a monitor. It’s been years since Apple’s sold low-end computers without an integrated monitor. I’d love to see this; I’ll probably buy a couple of them if they show up without any bizarre problems. Conventional wisdom suggests that Apple’s going to spin this with a “you love our iPod, wait till you see our computers” angle, aiming to make it cheap enough for Windows users to add a Mac to their collection without needing a $2,000 commitment. The downside, of course, is that tons of Mac people will buy these instead of Apple’s much more profitable iMac and Power Mac systems.
• Tiger. Apple announced the next generation of OS X last summer, but didn’t give us a shipping date other then a vague suggestion of 1H2005. I’ve heard rumors of late March the whole time; presumably Apple will actually give us a date next week. They’ll probably also show off a bunch of new features and abilities, including a better view of Spotlight and some new widgets for Dashboard. Personally, I think Dashboard might be the most important addition to Tiger, because it’s going to turn lightweight application development on its head–Dashboard widgets are really just web pages with Javascript attached, but Apple has added a handful of additional widgets and the ability to talk to more system services. Spotlight is cool, but Dashboard may just be cooler.

That looks like more then enough content for a 2-hour presentation. Odds are, there are a few fascinating little details missing, like a new feature for Tiger or a cool take on the iMac, or maybe the missing spreadsheet in iWork.

On the spreadsheet front–there’s no real reason to assume that Apple is building yet another Powerpoint/Word/Excel clone set. Frankly, given Apple’s usual history, it’s probably better to assume that they’re doing things a bit differently. The two names floating around–“Pages” and “Notes” suggest something more akin to a DTP program and a free-form organizational package then a real word processor. I’d really love to see something more innovative–none of the tools that I have today are really ideal for me, and Apple’s as good as anyone when it comes to finding unscratched itches in the market.

Apple announced a handful of product upgrades and price cuts today, including:

• Faster Xserves, now standard with 1 GB RAM and available with 2.3 GHz CPUs.
• Lower prices on all of their LCD displays, including their monster 30” model.
• Xsan, their long-delayed shared-disk filesystem (like GFS on Linux) is finally shipping.

Taken as a set, that’s a fairly impressive number of announcements from Apple. They didn’t make many changes to their computer lineup in the second half of 2004, which makes today’s announcements a bit more noteworthy. Especially when you consider that MWSF is happening next week, and Apple traditionally uses the keynote at MWSF to announce a pile of new products. Given that, today’s announcements suggest that Apple is going to be busy next week–if they were short of new things to talk about, then they’d have kept the Xserve announcements for a week and used them for keynote filler.

So, enquiring minds want to know, what is Apple going to announce next week? So far, the rumor mill has given us 4 items:

• iLife 2005, including a new iMovie with HD abilities and upgrades to the rest of their $50 home media tool pack. iMovie is the oldest of their iTools, and has always been kind of flaky for me; hopefully this will be the big upgrade that its been needing.
• iWork. No one’s completely sure what this will include, besides an upgrade to their Keynote presentation software, but most rumors feature a program named “Pages” or “Notes”; presumably a word processor. There are also rumors of some sort of Keynote-companion program, maybe a simple drawing/sketch program? This is supposed to replace Apple’s ancient AppleWorks package, which hasn’t been updated in years, but none of the rumors mention a spreadsheet, without which iWork won’t be very useful.
• The “headless iMac.” Thinksecret swears up and down that Apple will finally be selling a cheap ($500-$600) computer without a monitor. It’s been years since Apple’s sold low-end computers without an integrated monitor. I’d love to see this; I’ll probably buy a couple of them if they show up without any bizarre problems. Conventional wisdom suggests that Apple’s going to spin this with a “you love our iPod, wait till you see our computers” angle, aiming to make it cheap enough for Windows users to add a Mac to their collection without needing a $2,000 commitment. The downside, of course, is that tons of Mac people will buy these instead of Apple’s much more profitable iMac and Power Mac systems.
• Tiger. Apple announced the next generation of OS X last summer, but didn’t give us a shipping date other then a vague suggestion of 1H2005. I’ve heard rumors of late March the whole time; presumably Apple will actually give us a date next week. They’ll probably also show off a bunch of new features and abilities, including a better view of Spotlight and some new widgets for Dashboard. Personally, I think Dashboard might be the most important addition to Tiger, because it’s going to turn lightweight application development on its head–Dashboard widgets are really just web pages with Javascript attached, but Apple has added a handful of additional widgets and the ability to talk to more system services. Spotlight is cool, but Dashboard may just be cooler.

That looks like more then enough content for a 2-hour presentation. Odds are, there are a few fascinating little details missing, like a new feature for Tiger or a cool take on the iMac, or maybe the missing spreadsheet in iWork.

On the spreadsheet front–there’s no real reason to assume that Apple is building yet another Powerpoint/Word/Excel clone set. Frankly, given Apple’s usual history, it’s probably better to assume that they’re doing things a bit differently. The two names floating around–“Pages” and “Notes” suggest something more akin to a DTP program and a free-form organizational package then a real word processor. I’d really love to see something more innovative–none of the tools that I have today are really ideal for me, and Apple’s as good as anyone when it comes to finding unscratched itches in the market.

Looks like Apple added color and photo playback to the iPods. That’s interesting, but I’m not really in the market for one right now. On the other hand, CNet coverage of the announcement includes this fascinating little piece of text:

In addition to the new iPods, Apple also introduced a set of colored socks for carrying iPods. Apple will sell a set of six differently hued socks for $29.

WTF?

Engadget reports that Amazon is taking pre-orders for OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”), claiming that it’ll ship on March 31st, 2005.

Apple hasn’t officially announced anything, so odds are this is an Amazon snafu.

According to CNet, Apple is launching an iTunes affiliate program.

Essentially, you post iTunes Music Store links on your website and collect a 5% commission. I haven’t ran through all of the details yet, but I’m kind of fascinated. Since Apple themselves can’t be making much more then 5% per song, it’s entirely possible that an affiliate could set up a front end to Apple’s store and actually end up making more money off of it then Apple is. Admittedly, the total amount of money involved would be fairly small, and I doubt Apple is giving the affiliates a cut of the iPod sales (which is where Apple really makes their money on music), but it’s still an interesting concept. At the very least, blog-based music reviews and experimental music recommendation systems are going to get a boost.

Of course, knowing Apple, there’s something unpleasant hidden in the terms of the affiliate program. Either that, or they’ll change the program mid-stream and leave people screwed. Apple occasionally rivals Microsoft for the “world’s worst business partner” title.

I can tell that my PowerBook is going to need to be replaced before too much longer–it’s starting to shed pieces. A month or two ago, I lost my hard drive. This week’s victim is my keyboard–the left Command/Apple key broke off. It’s been having problems for weeks–one of the clips that holds it in place broke a month or so ago–but I’d hoped that it’d last a while longer. No luck–the second set of clips broke off this afternoon, leaving the key free to wander around my desktop. Since this is probably my second most commonly used key (after the space bar), it’s really hard to use the laptop without it.

I did a bunch of poking around online, and found replacement keyboards for as little as $79, but overnight shipping on one of those runs it back up over $100, and I’m trying to save money for a new Treo. So I looked around a while longer and discovered that pbparts.com sells replacement keycaps for $5. They still want over $8 for shipping, but I’m a lot happier paying $13 then I am paying $100.

While I was checking out, I noticed something interesting–the part that I was buying was labeled “command key,” not “left command key.” A quick check of the keyboard showed that the left and right command keys are, in fact, identical. So, after a brief hunt for tools, I popped the right command key off of the keyboard and swapped it with the broken left command key, and I’m back in business. There’s an ugly spot on my keyboard with no key, but that’ll go away in a couple days when the new key arrives. Until then, I have a perfectly functional keyboard with a working left command key.

Surprisingly enough, they also carry the screen release latch that died a couple months after I bought this thing. Apple was willing to replace it under warranty, but I wasn’t willing to part with my laptop for 2 weeks. I’ve mostly learned to live with the broken latch, but I’ll probably replace it sooner or later.