There's no doubt about it, Scrappy, there was enough Super Magic Happy-Fun Go Juice in that Stevenote to keep us Reality Distortion Field addicts flying high until at least, say, Thursday evening. Forget about the fact that so-called "dead certs" like new iPods and iMacs were nowhere to be found; it's Elvis's birthday and we can't even celebrate properly, thankyuhverruhmuch, because we're still plotzing at how Apple actually released not one, not two, but three new software applications with names that don't begin with a lowercase "i." Of course, what's really got us picking gravel out of our chins is how Apple just made titanium yesterday's metal.

Oh, sure, you can still buy titanium PowerBooks in a 15-inch form factor, but as of yesterday, the truly sexy portables-- whether you like 'em petite or big enough to double as a handy dashboard sun shade for your car-- are aluminum, baby. Apple's newest 12-inch and 17-inch laptops just made their grand entrance clad in a stunning aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. "Wow, just like a MagLite!" exclaimed Katie, AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae. "Or, um, an aircraft." Er, yeah. So that's it, folks; titanium is now passé, aluminum's all the rage, and when the spring fashions hit the runways in Milan, expect to see an awful lot of gaunt skinny ladies wearing Reynolds Wrap.

Now, we know that plenty of you are going ga-ga over such features as a mammoth 1440x900 widescreen display, integrated Bluetooth support, onboard FireWire 800, GeForce4 440 Go (oh, there are just way too many 4's in a row, there) graphics, etc., so we think it's important that you take a step back and focus on the single real reason why the new 17-inch PowerBook is about three generations ahead of the rest of the industry: the keyboard lights up. That's it, right there. The thing could otherwise be an antiquated and crashprone PowerBook 5300 and it'd still rule the roost, as long as the keyboard lights up. (Actually, bad example; the 5300's keyboard did light up, although only when the flames spread from the battery explosion.)

And while the new PowerBook's backlit keyboard is enough reason to give Jon Ive a big, sloppy wet kiss for his accomplishments, when you find out that the backlighting is automatically controlled via ambient light sensors built into the chassis, well, you're also going to want to buy the man a pony. All told, we're figuring these things are gonna fly out the doors-- yes, even though Jeff Goldblum's back doing voiceovers in the commercials. (Mini-Me and Yao Ming more than make up for that.)

Our only regret is that the light-up keyboard didn't make it into the 12-inch model, because we're looking to replace our original Blueberry iBook and it's pretty tough to pass up a 4.6-pound G4 portable with a footprint the size of a sheet of letter-size paper. Plus, you know, the low-end iBook we had been eyeing has a harsh white finish that makes it look like a cheap fridge from the Sears major appliance department, whereas the Baby Bear of the three PowerBooks sports that luscious aluminum exterior that makes it look like an expensive fridge from the Sears major appliance department. So hey, no-brainer, right?

Giganto-mini PowerBooks aside, January 7th was actually the International Day of the App. Indeed, we didn't actually keep count, but we're pretty good judges of these things and we estimate that the Stevenote was well into its sixteenth hour before Jobs wrapped up his demo of Apple's forty-fifth new or revised application and finally made with the aluminum already. That's not to say that each and every app he covered wasn't a solid addition to Apple's software farm, however, and there were even moments when we started to doubt the centuries-old maxim that "only hardware doth a keynote make."

No, one of those moments was not when Steve-o mentioned last week's bumping of iCal and iSync to 1.0.2 and 1.0, respectively. Don't get us wrong, we like the apps, but iCal's revision merely fixes bugs and improves performance-- and, frankly, we've never really found that processing delays in our calendaring software were costing us precious untold hours of lost productivity each week. iSync's emergence from public beta status tidies things up a bit, but despite finally attaining that elusive 1.0 seal of approval, we find it still insists on duplicating every event in our Palms and copying every contact's home email address as a work address as well. Oh, and for some reason it keeps renaming Phil Schiller "Sexy Beast" during the syncing process, but we're assuming that behavior's a feature, not a bug.

The updates to Apple's stable of creative iApps (as well as their integration and unification as iLife, the "Microsoft Office of the digital hub") came as a more exciting bit of news. Granted, the news that iPhoto 2 will now let us choose the music for our slideshows directly from our iTunes library was greeted here at the compound by the sound of crickets chirping, but the one-click Enhance and the Retouch brush, if they work as advertised, may save us a lot of routine trips to Photoshop. The addition of nifty new effects and something resembling actual audio editing to iMovie 3 will surely bring interminable vacation footage to a whole new level. And how 'bout chapter marker support in iDVD 3? Now your avant garde masterpiece "Ninety Minutes In The Life Of A Rock On My Porch" can allow your viewers to jump right to Minute 24 (the rock on the porch), Minute 59 (the rock on the porch), or even the climactic Minute 88 (the rock on the porch with a bug on it). Sundance, here you come.

Actually, though, if you're looking to take your work to Sundance, you're probably going to want a little more oomph than iMovie 3 has to offer (yes, even with the new Fairy Dust effect). What's that you say? As a starving artist, there's no way you can shell out a grand for Final Cut Pro? Fear not, Eisenstein-- at $299, Final Cut Express gives you most of the power at a fraction of the price, thus allowing you to skip fewer meals to raise the funds. Be warned, though; your art will certainly pay the price for your reduced corporeal suffering. Skimp on the martyrdom and misery and your next film will be less Citizen Kane and more The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.

For most people, we expect that Safari was the real software draw of the day. Finally, Apple's "first web browser"! (Somewhere, Cyberdog is weeping quietly to himself in a corner. Oh, how fleeting fame!) We've taken it for a spin, and so far we're giving it a thumbs-mostly-up; it's fast, no doubt about that, and so far it's rendered most pages (including this one) pretty darn close to how they're intended to look. It's still a little twitchy, though-- while our server was getting pummeled by extra Expo-induced traffic, other browsers simply waited a bit longer for the page to load fully, while Safari frequently pulled a Mr. Mercurial, threw its hands up in the air, shouted something about the network being dropped, and then stormed off and fired somebody in an elevator. Still, that's the coolest bookmarks implementation we've yet seen; is it cool enough to pry us away from OmniWeb's oh-my-god-how-did-we-ever-live-without-these location Shortcuts? Only time will tell.

For our money, though, the biggest news software-wise is Keynote. C'mon, the application built just for Steve so he could put together those splashy and droolific keynote slide shows, now available to any shlub with a C-note in his grubby little fist? That's huge. Web browsers come and go, but how often do you come across software that lets you be Steve anytime you want? We predict high sales among the obsessed (Mike Dell probably placed the first order), as well as a sudden run on black mock turtlenecks...

Well, the long-awaited next iteration of AirPort is finally here, and it's a doozy. At 54 Mbps, it packs five times the bandwidth of its predecessor, but since it's based on the "plays well with others" 802.11g standard instead of the "screw you guys, I'm going home" 802.11a, it's fully compatible with the older 11 Mbps equipment. The new cards cost $99, just like the old cards used to, and the new Base Station drops to a mere $99-- even though it boasts wacky new features like a port to add a range-extending antenna, and what we consider to be a stroke of pure genius: a USB port that allows every computer on your network to share a single USB printer. This is all undeniably good stuff.

But then they went and named it "AirPort Extreme." Hrm.

The serious old-timers around here will recall the rumors back in '97 that Apple planned to call its upcoming pro-level Power Mac (the one code-named PowerExpress) the Power Mac G3 Extreme, which only convinced us that The Steve may well still have been experiencing potent acid flashbacks. PowerExpress was cancelled, however, so we never got to find out whether the "Extreme" rumors had anything to them. All our concerns of "Extreme" product nomenclature dropped to the background for the next five years.

Of course, last year when Jaguar was touted as including "Quartz Extreme" technology, we had an inkling that it was the start of trouble. True, Quartz Extreme is merely a part of a major Apple product, not a product itself, but it all begins with the little things. And now here we are, facing the advent of AirPort Extreme, in all its technological glory and nomenclatural dorkiness. Worse yet? The Base Station actually has the words "AirPort Extreme" stamped right across the front of that otherwise supercool flying saucer.

What's next? AppleWorks Extreme? The RadicalMac? iPod To The Max? We're casting our vote for Mac OS X Bitchin', ourselves.