Twas the night before Macworld when all through the town
No MacBook was mooing nor turning brown

At Moscone, nerds were queuing with care
in hopes that Saint Steve would soon be there.

The new products and banners were nestled from view
while the Engadget and Gizmodo speculation grew.

And with Dvorak grumbling and Laporte poetically waxing,
Both were in town for credit card maxing.

When out from Las Vegas there arose such a clatter,
Macworld and CES at the same time? Too much data’r!

Off to the blogs, people covered the bash,
With videos and podcasts, served up by Flash.

Bloggers insight and intuition on the oft-wrong rumors,
Give analysts and traders new found tumors.

But, who has the best coverage? Which show should I do?
Will Steve bring us iTVs? Will Bill bring us 360’s part two?

Being a Mac geek through good and through ill,
I decided on San Francisco, and not Las Vegas, to visit Bill.

Will Apple bring us new ipods, iphones, itvs or more?
Or will this Macworld be a long winter’s bore?

After much anticipation, my energy did sap,
So I settled down for a fitful winter’s nap.

Of the keynote I did dream, Steve Jobs on the deck.
Worried engineers in the audience hoping their products won’t wreck.

He was dressed in blue jeans and a black turtleneck
and his clothes were well worn to not seem too exec.

A bundle of gadgets he had hidden stage right,
And a field of reality distortion was quite a sight!

His eyes how they twinkled, his remote well polished
It’s Vista from Redmond Steve wants abolished.

Alas, no details from the Expo were revealed in my dream
Despite how real the tech prophesies seem.

I guess I’ll have to wait to see what they meant,
As “representatives from Apple declined to comment”

Look forward to seeing you all at Macworld. I’ll be roaming the floor on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon.

WWDC has come and gone and many were left disappointed. Folks, WWDC is about the Mac. It’s not about the “iTunes Music/TV Shows/Movies/Games/ Books/whatever other rumor there is out there” store. Nor is about an iPod that slices, dices and julians. Nor was it about iPhones that Steve may or may not be showing off to all of his friends. It’s about the Mac. And boy did we get a good one. Who knew that Apple could produce a machine cheaper than Dell?

MacPro Benchmark Roundup – TUAW rounds up all the benchmarks fit to find on the web…. with one exception –

Ars Technica Mac Pro Review
The skinny on the Mac Pro, in 10,000 words or less.

Oh ya, WWDC was about Leopard, too. Time Machine (which I continually remember as Time Warp), iChat (which will be great for fixing my parent’s machine), and that irrepressible Core Animation (ok, whatever) are all really cool and maybe even useful new features. Honestly, though, I don’t think we’ve seen the cool parts yet.

Personally, my money is on just speed bumps, OS X.5 and natch, the Mac Pro. It’s WWDC, baby. It’s all about the Mac. We might see one more thing, but ultimately, it’s about the Mac.

TUAW roundup
WWDC banner – Engadget
“a dizzying amount of new products.” – Scoble
Leopard Feature Set Leaked – PowerPage

The rumor du jour is that Apple will announce movie downloads from the iTunes Music Store by year’s end. The rumor that won’t die was substantiated by Variety today with quotes from unnamed sources within the movie industry.

The article also talks about movie studios balking at the single $9.99 price point that Jobs has proposed, getting Apple to relent to a two-tiered pricing system of $19.99 for new releases and $9.99 for catalog titles.

While I have no doubt that this rumor is true, two other products must be released to make this happen. First, a new widescreen iPod must be released and more importantly, a device for the living room needs to be released as well. Why? Movie downloads are great, but the screen on the current iPod is too small for movie viewing and more importantly, the market for video at home (vs. on the go) is much, much larger.

What is the living room device? I’m not sure what form it will take, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a Mac Mini, as it is too expensive and might scare Windows users (the larger market) away.

Read [via AppleInsider]

Looks like our old pal Dave Zatz has uncovered some possible release information about the vapor-friendly Tivo Series 3 (the standalone HD Tivo with 2 CableCard enabled tuners and 2 OTA tuners). Tivo is having an American Idol related contest and the grand prize is a Series 3 Tivo. The contest ends at the end of American Idol on May 24th. The rules stipulate that the prizes will be given away no later than 4 months after the end of the contest.

So, what does all of this mean? There are two ways that you could look at this:

Now, I saw the Series 3 in perfect working order at CES this year and I banged on it quite a bit. I realize that it may have not been completely baked, it was mostly baked. My guess is that they are waiting for something else like a deal with cable companies (other than Comcast) or they are still figuring out pricing.

Oh ya, the dollar value they’ve put on the Series 3 with lifetime service is $1500, but with their new pricing model, I don’t know how much this tells us either.

Read

Contest Rules

Jonesing for your Swimsuit Edition in you pocket? Tomorrow morning, Apple is there to help you view SI’s bathing beauties while on that commuter flight to Des Moines. $16 gets you all the videos for your iPod so you can look less creepy in coach oogling scantily clad young girls in your spare time.

Read

(Via TUAW)

CNET is speculating this morning about a potential “partnership” between Cisco and Tivo. Could Cisco be Tivo’s potential white knight? Well, the deal kind of makes sense, but I think that this is someone at CNET’s HQ is not-so-secretely wishing in their heart of hearts that their Tivo won’t go away.

Their rationale is that Cisco has been making a bigger push into consumer electronics, specifically with their acquisitions of cable box maker, Scientific Atlanta, and home networking gear maker, Linksys.

In any case, I’m also not-so-secretly wishing in my heart of hearts that Tivo won’t go away(and that they will ship their CableCard Tivo soon), so we’ll be watching this story closely.

Read

(Via HD Beat)

Sony, in a cost cutting effort, has cut the AIBO and Qualia lines from production, according to Akihabara News. I think quite a few geeks will be sad to see the AIBO line die, but few will lament the passing of Sony’s Qualia line.

Qualia, FYI, is Sony’s ultra high end line of consumer electronics. This line includes a $27,000 projector, $12,000 rear projections television, $3300 headphones, and my personal favorite the $3300 2 megapixel digital camera.

The problems withe Qualia brand were not just with prices, but it was incredibly questionable if there was a market for such devices. Sony wasn’t successful in making Qualia truly aspirational products. I mean, if the incredibly rich don’t want them, why would John Q. Public?

Oh well, no one is crying over Qualia, but AIBO lovers, you might consider the Robosapien or some other more-human robot companion.

Read

Zatz Not Funny has some exclusive pics of some new HME features.

TiVo is beefing up their HME offerings by centrally hosting applications and partnering with Yahoo! Yahoo! weather, traffic, and photos are available by entering your account info on the TiVo box. Also being previewed are Internet radio (Live365), the podcaster application I saw at Digital Life, Fandango movie tickets, and some various games.

Looks pretty sweet, but criminey pete, just give me the CableCard model so I can dump my craptastic Comcast PVR.

Read

Is it that time already? It looks like the speculation has already begun as to what will be announced at Macworld Expo in January. Apple announcement speculation has a special place in my heart. I like to kick back at the end of the year with my nerd kin and come up with what we want Santa Jobs to give us post-Christmas.

Think Secret is reporting that Macworld will deliver us an Intel based Mac Mini PVR. While in my nerdy heart of hearts I want this to be true, I think it’s too soon after the release of Front Row. For the record, I believe that Front Row will be bundled into whatever Apple has cooked up for iLife ‘06.

(Via PVRblog.)