Ah, iTunes: the veritable Swiss Army Knife of digital music. It encodes MP3s from your CD collection and stores them in a handy searchable catalog. It lets you tune in to Internet radio stations. It lets you create and manage custom playlists of your favorite songs. Provided you've got the hardware, it lets you burn those songs on new audio CDs. If you've got a supported portable MP3 player, it lets you load it up with music to take on the go. And it even offers you a built-in hippy-trippy light show so you can spend your hard-earned cash on blank CD-R media instead of expensive hallucinogenic controlled substances. It slices, it dices, it cuts through this steel can and still slices this tomato! Is there anything iTunes can't do?

Answer: yes-- for now. For one thing, for some arcane reason known only to Steve and his closest acolytes, iTunes still doesn't have an equalizer, so forget about adjusting treble and bass settings. While you can certainly burn custom CDs, iTunes doesn't magically make them look as good as they sound. There's also the slightly worrisome matter of Kerbango (the service by which iTunes tracks Internet radio stations) having gone kerblammo, which throws a wrench in the works. And lastly, no matter how hard we try or what buttons we press, we've been utterly unable to persuade iTunes to fix us even the most basic of sandwiches. But iTunes is only at version 1.1 (or 1.1.1 for Mac OS X), and you can bet that Apple isn't stopping there.

For example, while we're not in the habit of believing everything that floats into our inbox, reports from a couple of anonymous stoolies claim that Macworld Expo will mark the debut of iTunes 1.2, which, in addition to sporting improved support for third-party CD-RW drives, will also include a module that will automate the printing of attractive custom CD labels (and possibly jewelcase trayliners and inserts) according to several pre-determined "themes." (Die-cut cardstock and label paper for this function will allegedly be available via the iTunes Accessories page at the Apple Store.)

On the Kerbango front, as faithful viewer and self-appointed Mac OS Rumors watchdog The M@d H@tter points out, MOSR claims that Apple is working on its own Internet radio tracking system to replace 3Com's ill-fated service in an update to iTunes due "in several months." That's for the short-term. Further down the road, Apple is supposedly getting much more ambitious; the company is said to be building its own virtual record store, through which iTunes users will be able to "search for their favorite music and buy it in a QuickTime-based MP3 audio format that includes digital rights protection." Imagine shelling out six virtual bucks for an album that then appears conveniently in your iTunes music library-- all from within iTunes itself. How very "digital hub."

We don't know how much (if any) of this is true, but hey, it's nice to dream. Oh, and various shadowy sources are pretty sure that, yes, the next version of iTunes will even include an equalizer (it's about freakin' time!), but the sandwich-maker plugin isn't expected until a later release. What? But we're hungry now!

For those of you still hard at work crafting a Unified Expo Theory of Expected Keynote Revelations, we've got a new wrinkle for you to work into the mix. It's well-known that one extremely reliable indicator that a particular Apple product line is about to be updated is the introduction of one or more promotions intended to clear the channel of that gear; you have, no doubt, already incorporated the current iMac promos (both of which end conveniently on July 8th) into your Stevenote expectations. (At this point, the only people still skeptical of a new iMac next month also think the earth is flat and Steve Jobs is originally from this planet.)

There's been a fair amount of buzz recently-- some of it originating from us-- that Apple is also gearing up to unveil new, zippier Power Macs in a few weeks, possibly starting at 733 MHz on the low end and scaling up to or past 1 GHz for the top-of-the-line model. However, this is where things get hairy: if you've been paying attention, you've probably noticed that there isn't a single Apple promo currently running on Power Mac systems. On top of that fact, according to MacReviewZone's handy list of Power Mac deals, all of the major Internet-based Mac dealers appear to have plenty of Power Macs in stock; MacMall alone reportedly has 330 of the 733 MHz models on the shelf and ready to ship. That sure doesn't sound like a channel prepared for a flood of new systems to us.

At the same time, though, the Power Mac line is definitely due for an upgrade; it's been over six months since the last speed boost, and the natives are getting restless for some more speed-- especially with Intel set to release a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 next week, as reported by CNET. So your tricky task is to decide; are the reports of imminent faster Power Macs just yet another net-borne hoax, or has Apple simply gotten tired of savvy Mac fans noticing the "Promo = New Systems" pattern and somehow found a way to avoid that surprise-spoiling hint? (And if it's the latter, then why are the iMacs being promoted so aggressively they may as well have the phrase "LIVING ON BORROWED TIME" etched into their cases?)

Now let's confuse things still further, shall we? Faithful viewer Thippy SanPedro just noticed something terribly interesting going on over at the Apple Store; if you click on the "Special Deals" button (which normally takes you to a page jam-packed with scads of refurbished and discontinued products available at reduced prices), you'll find this mysterious message: "As of Thursday, June 28th, Refurbished Apple Products are currently out of Stock." We'll leave it up to you to decide just how that little fact fits into the pre-Expo speculation. Only the seriously unbalanced would consider the possibility that Apple cleared out its Special Deals section in preparation for a post-Expo buyback of all unsold discontinued models just so the company could introduce new Macs without tipping off the fan base-- but heck, what's a little craziness between friends?

We were originally going to cover this yesterday, but the sudden appearance of the "Redmond Justice" appeals court decision sort of overshadowed things a smidge. Remember a few weeks ago, when word got out that Microsoft was planning on sticking a feature called "Smart Tags" into Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6? The idea was that Microsoft's operating system and browser would transform ordinary, unlinked words in web pages into links that the page's webmaster never intended in the first place. This "feature," you can imagine, struck some people as the final, incontrovertible evidence that Bill Gates and Satan are one and the same-- or at least close poker buddies. (Certainly the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg thought so.)

Microsoft, for its part, maintained that it just couldn't see what all the fuss was about; so the Department of Justice web site viewed in IE6/WinXP just happens to link to a slew of Microsoft goods and services-- so what? Besides, this innocuous little "improvement" is turned off by default (um, if was so harmless, why?), and webmasters have the option of adding code to any pages they'd like to remain unmolested by Smart Tags. Of course, that code would have to be added to each individual page, but isn't that what webmasters are paid for?

But enough people were upset by Microsoft's transparent attempt to leverage its operating system monopoly (and now its browser monopoly) to turn the Internet into one huge MSN portal, that the company was forced to reconsider its rollout of the Smart Tags feature-- for a little while, at least. According to an update by Mr. Mossberg pointed out to us by faithful viewer Matt Kopko, Microsoft has decided to ditch Smart Tags in the final version of Windows XP, slated for a late October release, primarily to avoid a firestorm of controversy; "we got way more feedback than we ever expected," says the company's Jim Allchin. You really have to love a company that's still surprised and baffled when, say, people actually complain that they don't want their copyrighted material transformed by default into free advertising for someone else's business.

Microsoft plans to return to the drawing board and revive Smart Tags later on, in some unspecified less controversial form. In the meantime, they hope to compensate their users for the loss of such a useful tool by adding in a new feature which simply restricts all web-browsing to Microsoft-owned sites. It's not a problem, though-- users will easily be able to turn it off in the Preferences. So quit complaining.