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Steve Job's keynote just finished (MacWorld New York.) New 17 inch flat panel iMac (1440x900). 256 megs ram, 80 gig hard drive, Superdrive (DVD player/burner; CD player/burner), Gforce 4 mx graphics.
$1999.
Clearly the most powerful consumer machine in the $2000 range. Only an incremental improvement, but it's very impressive nonetheless. As a first computer there isn't a better choice.
Also, the 5 gig iPod drops to $299, the 10 gig to $399, and a new 20 gig (!) is $499. Oh, and they work with Windows now. Still can't make playlists on the fly though. :(
Lots of Jaguar (OS X 10.2) previews. Out August 24th. $129. Looks great.
iTunes 3 is out, with only minor revisions. But my most wanted feature was added, so I'm very happy. iTunes will now automatically normalize the sound levels of all songs across your collection. This was a nightmare problem for me making playlists for the restaurants. I had to go in by hand and tweak the levels on all the songs because some CDs are so much louder than others. But no more. Nice.
iCal is the new (free download of course) calendar app. Looks very slick. I'll be quite interested to see how open the data format is.
More to come on iSync and Rendezvous. Certainly Palm and bluetooth phone owners will be happy with the much improved integration. Looks like I might have to get the Sony/Ericsson T68i.
For my next trick I will try to download and install the new Quicktime 6 just released by Apple. If it doesn't completely fubar my system I will report back.