Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

The first mention of the new products is the .Mac page on iLife ‘06. The Apple Store is updated too, with the tag line: What’s an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it ever did in a PC. And finally, the MacBook Pro and iMac product pages (you’ll probably need [...]

Then there’s the third interpretation of the silent upgrades to Mac Minis: that there will be no refresh of the current hardware for a while. iMacs in Intel but no Mac Minis yet. All of a sudden the price point of the Mini–now 2-3x slower than a base iMac at half to 3/4s the price–doesn’t [...]

With the new photocasting capability of the just announced iPhoto update from Apple, which uses RSS as a medium for photo subscriptions, Apple has turned a corner, and so has RSS. I think the day of the monolithic aggregator may be coming to an end. The direction is now toward contextual RSS: feeds of information [...]

Okay, Mac OS X 10.4.4 is coming out today, as are some new widgets, including a new Address Book widget (good, cause the last one blew). New iLife: “music, movies, photos, blogs.” iPhoto update improves speed (good), raises limit on max photos in library to 250,000. Improved quality in both hardcover and softcover iPhoto books. [...]

Via MacRumors keynote updates, a $49 add-on that combines a remote control for the iPod with an FM radio tuner. Works with current models.
Question: does anyone still care about FM radio? A: Yes, if they are in listening range of KEXP, WRIR, or (name your favorite locally run indie station here).

Currently watching for updates:

Engadget liveblog–though it’s currently hammered to its knees
MacRumors IRC channel (server:irc.macrumors.com, channel #macrumors; avoid the #macrumorschat channel unless you have a very high threshold for hearing the same jokes over and over again)
UneasySilence
MacNN
ArsTechnica — also currently broken

I see that .Mac is now down for maintenance, heralding the start of whatever joys are due to be rolled out on Apple’s web based services. I sure hope it’s not going to be down until the keynote is over at 1:30 PM.
I must have hit the server just at the right time; at 10:10 [...]

The odds makers have already spoken about the likely products to be announced during today’s keynote. I’m going to speak up with some slightly contrarian predictions.
First, what the consensus has right: the FrontRow “media center” concept, with its 10-foot UI and remote, will be extended beyond its current home on the iMac to the Mac [...]

A new mix minifeature kicks off today, inspired by the recent loss of my iTunes library. I was able to rebuild some mixes from Art of the Mix, but had to go back to j-cards from the original tapes for many of my playlists. At that point I decided that it was time to stop [...]