There are some advantages to staying up super late. I had some stuff to do tonight, and kind of randomly pulled up the Apple online store when lo and behold, I have a scoop! The Apple Store is currently down… and today (tomorrow for me) is Tuesday, which is when Apple typically releases new products.

I don’t know what it will be. BUT… I’ve been telling folks for a couple weeks that I think Apple will be updating the iMac soon. They had a “limited time offer” on refurbs of the current generation listed at the online store for just about two weeks now, and to me that meant that at least an updated iMac is coming, if not a bigger revision of the best computer on the planet! 🙂

So anyway. Now that I’ve broken the story…

I’m going to bed. 🙂

Check the apple store for what the actual news is tomorrow. 😉

The big news from the keynote presentation from Steve Jobs today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco was the announcement of the highly anticipated ultra-portable laptop – the MacBook Air. This computer is as thin as .16″ and the full thickness when closed is .76″. Whoa. Still has all the bells and whistles! (13″ screen, 80GB hd, 2GB ram, built-in iSight camera, backlit keyboard, multi-touch track pad, 802.11n wi-fi, Bluetooth 2.1, and some cool software that allows you to access/use an optical drive on a network computer – Mac or PC!)

They’re pretty pricy, but also a pretty amazing little product. You can even get it with a solid-state drive (flash drive), which might give you more battery life, but definitely is super fast and less parts to breakdown.

Other announcements included a new wireless router (AirPort Extreme base station) that includes a hard drive for easy network access, and Time Machine backups. It’s called Time Capsule, and is available in 500GB or 1TB. And, the iPod Touch received some software updates, allowing iPod touch owners to access Mail via their iPod as well as some other “essentials” (weather, stocks, etc).

The other big announcement involved iTunes and the AppleTV. iTunes sells movies, but not all that well. Not compared to how they do with music. The AppleTV has done OK, but not that well. Well, now the newly lower-priced AppleTV gives you access to much more movie content which can be rented and immediately watched on your AppleTV. Movie rentals are $2.99 and $3.99 for 24 hour rentals. HD movie rentals are $4.99. You can also purchase music directly on your AppleTV now as well.

I’m still waiting for Apple to fully get into the TV business and release a real AppleTV. We should start saving up now, cause I know it’s coming! 🙂

Fun stuff today from Apple. Not sure I’ll be getting any of it soon, but those MacBook Airs will sell faster than anything Apple has ever made. Even at that price (starts at $1799). Just watch and see.

[for more coverage, see the archived live coverage page from Macworld.com.]

It’s that time of year again, the annual Macworld Conference and Expo is going on starting today in San Francisco, CA! For some reason I am not as excited this year as I usually am… maybe just too busy with other stuff. But, I’m sure I’ll be following tomorrow’s keynote presentation by Steve Jobs around my lunchtime and will be at least slightly excited by the new products and services announced.

Rumored this year is a new super slim MacBook. They are calling it the MacBook Air. We’ll see what actually shows up.. there are a lot of rumors supporting something like that though, so I’d say that will be one of them.

Expect a full report back here tomorrow sometime. 🙂

In the meantime, here’s a pretty decent link with rumor “news” if you’re interested.

I’m sure you’ll remember that we stood in line on the night that Apple released their new operating system—Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard—and got ourselves some snazzy t-shirts… well, we finally got the OS, too! I have installed it on my laptop, and it’s pretty neat. There are still many questions I have about it (Safari—the browser—crashes a lot, and the networking seems… fishy, among other things) but overall I do like a lot of the new features. Will be better when I can install it on my main machine here. (Too busy to risk doing that right now!!)

Besides Leopard there are a couple other items of interest I saw come across the RSS feed today…

Macs indeed cheaper than PCs
Multiplying Mac Trojan not epidemic yet

Yes folks, there are rumors of another Mac virus, and though I’ll admit to not investigating thoroughly, it’s still not the same as a self-propagating virus as you see infecting the Windows world. Not making excuses here, just trying to quell the shouts of, “Macs get viruses too!!!” Apparently there is a LOT of user input necessary for this virus to do anything. (Downloading, clicking, installing, etc.) And again, it’s not self-propagating.

So, interesting stuff if you’re a Mac fan.

And really… who isn’t? 🙂

Just in case you are not subscribed to my Apple blog… thought I would let you know that Apple announced a release date for their long-awaited OS update. October 26th will be the day you can get your hands on the latest and greatest OS! There are links to pages detailing the many new features and upgrades on the article I posted at my Apple blog. Head over and check it out!

(If you already know you just want to buy it, you can click on the software retail box above…) 🙂