This morning, in an unusual release date (Apple doesn’t normally release new stuff on Monday) Apple introduced revised Powerbooks and iBooks

So, as of today.. Apple is not making a machine that clocks out at less then 1Ghz. Full specs are available here . All in all a good update to the laptop line… Airport extreme now standard on High end iBook and all the Powerbooks.

This release comes on the heels of announcing new versions of Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, a new title called Motion, another new one called xSan at NAB yesterday…

Apple also released an updated version of the Airport software, and a new Airport management utility this morning. Apple product release gnomes have been very busy the last 48 hours…

This morning, Apple introduced the latest revision to their eMac line of computers.

Both of the models feature 1.25Ghz G4 processors. The RAM has been upgraded to DDR RAM, which is faster then older SDRAM. The combo drive version starts at $799, with the superdrive version coming in at $999. So you can now make your own DVDs for less then a grand… all in all, a very solid update for the ‘low’ end of the Mac lineup. Full specs are here.

Hurry up and redeem any codes you’ve got laying around.

The contest officially ended 3/31/04 – but, all valid codes must be redeemed by 4/30/04. So, hurry up and redeem ’em.. I know you can probably still buy the special bottles/cups but, sales of the products for the contest don’t help Apple’s iTunes music numbers – redeeming them does. So, redeem away, and let’s see how many of the 100 million songs Pepsi is giving away actually get redeemed.

In a completely unexpected move from Apple – they change chips!

A press release was issued today that announced products starting to ship TODAY! with a top speed of 8Ghz!

Here’s an excerpt from the release:

Apple Computer, in a move to meet customer demand for chips with higher clock speed, even if they are lower powered then the current line of PowerPC chips revised their entire lineup this morning. A statement from Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs said, in part, “We thought our customer’s understood that clock speed wasn’t everything, I mean.. we introduced the world’s first 64-bit desktop computer based on the PowerPC G5 chip last summer.. and people are complaining that its clock speed isn’t as fast as some of Intel’s 32-bit chips! Since our customer’s apparently aren’t ready for 64-bit high-powered goodness, we’ve decided to move back to the PowerPC 603e chip. Yes, its much less powerful then our current line of G4 and G5 chips, but, it does have a high clock speed”

The line up now looks like this:

Dual Processor 8.0Ghz Power Mac -10GB HD, 128MB RAM – CDRW drive – $5500.00

Single Processor 7.0 Ghz Power Mac – 10 GB HD, 128MB RAM – CDRW drive – $4500.00

PowerBook03e – 5 Ghz – 7 GB HD – 128MB RAM – CDROM drive – $3500.00

iMac – 3 Ghz – 5 GB HD – 256MB RAM – CDRW drive – $2500.00

iBook – 2 Ghz – 5GB HD – 128MB RAM – CDRW Drive – $3000.00

Hurry… go buy yours today from Apple.com!

Yep….yet another reminder that today is April Fools Day…

Apple released a minor OS Update today… so go launch Software Update and get yourself a bunch of update-y goodness. And another iTunes Music Store milestone….

The iTunes Music Store sold its 50 millionth song last Thursday afternoon…something by Sara McLaughlin if I remember what I read in the press release correctly…. and that 50 million does NOT include any of the songs downloaded as part of Pepsi’s 100 million song giveaway! Not bad for a music store all the ‘experts’ keep saying is going to fail…

For comparison’s sake.. the most recent numbers released by Napster show that it has sold 5 million songs…. which is what the iTunes music store sells in about 3 weeks (something like 1.3 million songs/week at the moment for iTMS)

Here’s what’s new in 10.3.3:

The 10.3.3 Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for Mac OS X v10.3 “Panther” and is recommended for all users.

Key enhancements include:

• network volumes are now available in the Finder sidebar and Desktop for convenient access

• improved file sharing and directory services for Mac (AFP), UNIX (NFS) and PC (SMB/CIFS) networks

• improved PostScript and USB printing

• updated Disk Utility, DVD Player, Image Capture, Mail and Safari applications

• additional support for FireWire and USB devices

• improved compatibility for third party applications

• previous standalone security updates and Bluetooth Update 1.5

For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n25711

Apple opened another retail store yesterday (Saturday the 28th)

If I can count right.. its the 76th store opened… and the first one in San Francisco. Its another flagship store. Which means its multiple stories, has the cool glass staircase, a comfy theatre, and about a bazillion people in line for the opening.

Apple has posted a gallery from the opening, you can see it here.

Something new at this opening, was allowing people to purchase ‘surprise bags’ for $249. Each of which contained anywhere from $600 to $1000 worth of Apple and Non-Apple goodies (I haven’t seen a full list, and not of all them contained the same thing apparently) But, it would be interesting to see if they sold out of the bags…

OK, so this is nothing new to most Mac users….

But.. it’s official now.. at least according to a British security group…

According to mi2g OS’ running varients of the BSD family of unix (including Mac OS X) are the most secure out there. mi2g only dealt with overt digital attacks..they completely ignored viruses and worms..so windows had fewer breaches then I would have expected…

another highlight.. “recorded breaches against government servers running BSD or Mac OS X worldwide fell to zero in January 2004.”

Get it while it’s hot

Now in your software update … iSync 1.4 provides support for more Symbian OS smart phones as well as other enhancements and improvements…

Apple released iLife ’04 on the 16th. I’ve been playing with it for the last few days……

And so far, I’m impressed with the improvements made to all of the iApps (iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD…iTunes wasn’t updated with the rest of them, staying at its existing version 4.2).

iPhoto –

The major update is the ability to work with libraries of photos that are in excess of 25,000 pictures without huge wait times. Granted, I only have about 1500 pictures in my library at the moment.. so I still have a ways to go before I hit that size library, but even working with my smaller library has shown speed improvements.

Slideshow improvements – You can now use more then 1 song at a time in your slideshow, and there are a bunch of new transitions to use as you go from one picture to the next.

“Smart Albums” – a feature taken from iTunes’ smart playlists, you set criteria, and the albums automatically update with whatever pictures match your criteria.

Lots of other little improvements, and under the hood stuff to.

iMovie –

Faster! much faster. New titles (Including the crawling text made famous by the Star Wars movies).

New transitions

The ability to edit your clip on the timeline – And undo anything you might screw up. iMovie is still a Non-destructive editor, which is nice

iDVD –

The big one here is that the maximum movie size has been extended to 2 hours on a single DVD-R, due to enhanced compression. I haven’t had a chance to play with iDVD yet, so I don’t know if this effects encoding time, although I’d imagine that it does.

New themes, there are a bunch of new themes, and you can add a theme to each different menu page.

GarageBand –

Brand new application, allows anyone to create music, it functions as a full recording/mixing studio. Since I can’t carry a tune.. I don’t think I’ll be doing much with this, but it is fun to play with!

Lifli software has released a new version of iBlog. You can download it here Most of the features in the new version don’t apply to me, since I use the .Mac version of iBlog, and can only create a blog on my .Mac disk space. But one feature that does apply to all iBlog users, is a Auto Abstract feature (which I’m trying on this entry). The Auto Abstract is supposed to create the abstract version of each entry (the part you see on the main page, that has the short information with the “Read More” link.

The AA feature has got a little slider bar, where you control how much of your body entry is used to make up the abstract, anywhere from 1-100%, as well as a check box to enable/disable it. One bug I’ve noticed as I’m creating this entry, is that if part of the body that the AA feature chooses has got a hyperlink in it (in this case, the link to download the updated iBlog) the AA doesn’t keep the link information, just the text. I’ll have to remember to submit that one as a bug.

One feature I’d like to see added to iBlog is some indication to the reader, whether or not there is anything else on the ‘read more’ page. I’ve seen other Blogging software that has information in parentheses after the “read more” link that tells you how many more words, and/or pictures are in the “body” of the entry. I’ve requested the feature from Lifli Software, so who knows, perhaps it will end up getting added at some point in the future.