Well, we'll certainly say one thing about the Honorable Mr. Jobs: the man clearly has guts, and we don't mean he keeps assorted viscera cooling in a bucket in the corner of his living room. (He might, actually, but that's beside the point.) Given that the price of computer equipment is supposed to go down, not up, who else would get up in front of six thousand customers and announce that he's tacking another hundred bucks onto the sticker price of his company's hottest product? Mere mortal CEOs would only do such a thing live via satellite for fear of immediate retaliation by disgruntled audience members packing heat; heck, even a Kevlar black turtleneck isn't much protection from a head shot, and Steve's head is big enough to make an easy target for even the most casual marksman. Like we said, the man has guts-- and the fact that they're still pumping away inside his abdominal cavity following that little keynote stunt speaks volumes about the powers of the Reality Distortion Field.

For those who may have missed the skinny, you can check out Apple's official press release, which does its best to spin the "good news, bad news" game to the company's advantage: the headline, in large print, boldly proclaims, "Apple in Volume Production of New iMacs." (Yay!) Unfortunately, the finer print immediately adds that there's also a "$100 Price Increase Due To Rising Component Costs." (Boo!) So while Apple has shipped "more than 125,000" new iMacs in the past two months (more than many analysts had come to expect) and is now churning out "over 5,000 new iMacs per day," unless you already had your system on order, you can expect to fork over $1399/$1599/$1899 instead of the original $1299/$1499/$1799 that lots of Grumpy Guses were already calling "too expensive." Seeing as Apple plans to honor all existing preorders at the original price, this marks one of those rare occasions when the early adopters actually wound up getting a better deal.

For what it's worth, the stated reason for the price hike is perfectly understandable: according to Apple, in just the past two months, "memory costs have tripled and flat-panel costs have increased twenty-five percent," and the sitch is likely to get worse before it gets better. Therefore, instead of either cheaping down the iMac by reducing its feature set or trimming its margins to Wall Street-unfriendly levels, the company has opted to squeeze an extra hundred clams out of each sale. Alert fans may recognize the subtle twist on the strategy enacted during the "Great G4 Speed Dump of '99"; whereas back then Apple ratcheted back performance while keeping prices the same (a move which prompted more than its share of cries for the CEO's head on a platter), this time Apple evidently figured that upping the price while keeping the specs the same would lead to fewer riots in the streets. And hey, at least this time around, Apple is honoring all existing orders right off the bat, instead of repeating that whole "cancel and reinstate" fiasco from last time.

Hey, we just noticed that during this keynote, Apple didn't drop a single price. Think about it: the new 10 GB iPod costs an extra hundred bucks, while the original 5 GB model remains rock-steady at $399; the new 23-inch Cinema HD Display costs a grand more than the long-standing 22-inch model, whose price sticks at $2499; and the iMac's sticker price got bumped up a Benjamin just to keep things interesting. In other words, nobody who hoped to save a few bucks by delaying their purchases until after the Stevenote actually benefited from that plan, and a sizeable portion of them actually wound up losing a hundred smackers in the process. Ouch. Think Steve's trying to send us a message? We get the distinct feeling that the moral to this story is supposed to be "BUY NOW OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES." Heck, what's a little wanton spending between friends?

Truth be told, that $100 iMac price hike doesn't really bother us one bit-- in part for the incredibly selfish reason that we weren't planning on buying a new iMac anyway, so the increase doesn't put us out in the least, but also for the equally selfish reason that we're just far more excited about the developments in the iPod realm. As widely predicted, and as first reported by faithful viewer Lawrence Person, Steve indeed took the wraps off of a 10 GB version of that shiny little powerhouse ("2,000 songs in your pocket") during his Tokyo keynote, and it sells for $499. Better still, the original 5 GB model is still available at the same old price of $399, which means we can be happy that we bought our own iPods when we did, because waiting this long wouldn't have saved us a dime. We know, we know... a lot of you were banking on the original iPods coming down to $299 or so. Heck, we expected that to happen ourselves. As it turns out, though, as existing iPod owners who shelled out the 400 clams early on,in a perverse sorta way, we're actually a little glad that the original price stands. Sick, yes, but true. Sorry about that.

But even that's not what we found to be so spine-tinglingly thrilling in iPodville last night. See, according to Apple's official press release, instead of devoting development time to cobbling together Windows-compatible software for the 'Pod (a project that we'd consider to be a dreadful misuse of company resources), Apple has added all sorts of nifty enhancements to the iPod's software. First and foremost, the iPod now supports twenty equalizer settings, thus eliminating what was probably the most frequently-voiced criticism of the device other than its price tag-- and individual EQ settings can even be assigned per song and carried over from iTunes. We can personally attest to the fact that this makes our iPods a lot more listenable in the AtATmobile; there's no preset for "Blown Car Speakers," but for whatever reason, "Treble Reducer" makes for a decent substitute.

Then there's the new "Contacts" feature, which lets you tote up to a thousand contact entries on your 'Pod just by dropping VCard files (such as those dragged out of Palm Desktop 4.0 or Mac OS X's Address Book) into a special folder on the iPod itself. (Some folks over at ProVUE are smacking themselves right about now.) It's no substitute for a full-featured PDA, but if you're not the PDA type but won't leave the house without your tunes, you may well find the iPod's new Contacts feature a useful little bonus. Best of all, these and a host of other handy improvements are available for free to existing iPod owners simply by downloading and installing iPod Software 1.1. Life is good. (By the way, don't panic-- faithful viewer opus_gumbo notes that the Breakout game is now invoked by holding down the center button while in the "Legal" section of "Settings.")

And yet, we still haven't gotten to the real reason we're all agog, iPodically speaking. Larger capacities and a slew of new features are all well and good, but the true innovation to emerge from Apple's iPod department can be summed up in one glorious word: engraving. Yup, for just $49, the Apple Store with laser-engrave up to two 27-character lines of customized text right on the iPod's mirrorlike back. And while that doesn't do a whole lot of good to those of us who already own unpersonalized iPods, we're pretty sure that we can probably duplicate the effect after the fact with a steady hand and the pointy end of a Staedtler compass, so we're willing to be gracious about the new customers getting this spiffy new option.

All told, with a choice between 5 and 10 GB capacities, its new equalizer and Contacts functions, the ability to engrave a dirty couplet on its back, and Apple's apparent plan never to drop the iPod's price until Western civilization comes crashing down around our ears, you're clearly out of excuses; it's time to buy an iPod. Sell the kids if you have to; heck, you can always make more, right?

If you were holding off on getting a new Apple display in hopes that you'd see new models and price drops on existing inventory at Macworld Tokyo, well, one out of two ain't all bad. Prices on the existing 15-inch, 17-inch, and 22-inch LCDs haven't budged a penny, but as faithful viewer DeadEnd points out, at least you now have one additional option: the obscenely indulgent Apple Cinema HD Display. Yes, if shelling out $2499 for twenty-two diagonal inches of LCD-y goodness delivering 1600x1024 pixels of bright, flicker-free screen real estate just didn't feel decadent enough, now you can toss in an extra thou and net yourself one more diagonal inch and an extra 665,600 pixels-- just to inspire the sort of envy that leads to actual murders, instead of mere maimings.

Apple claims that the "HD" stands for "High Definition," but we find it easier just to think of it as "Highly Desirable." With a 23-inch screen and a mammoth 1920x1200 resolution, this widescreen puppy is just the $3499 accessory for the Macophile who has everything... well, everything else, anyway. You're going to hear a lot of talk from Apple (as well as from professionals trying to justify a $3499 purchase requisition) about how much more productive you can be with that much screen space at your disposal, and while we certainly wouldn't claim that those arguments are bogus, at this point, the Cinema HD Display functions primarily as the ultimate Mac status symbol. It's excess at its finest. Seriously, at first glance, who's going to impress you more: the guy with the dual-1 GHz Power Mac and a 17-inch Studio Display, or the one with the entry-level G4/800 jacked into twenty-three diagonal inches of sheer visual extravagance? Exactly.

Meanwhile, those of you who don't have a couple of convenient truckloads of cash sitting around in your mansions might be a tad disappointed that prices on the other displays didn't drop at all; well, so are we, but maybe we should just consider ourselves lucky. Given that the price of the iMac just increased $100 due in part to a reported 25% boost in flat-panel component prices over the past two months, we're actually almost surprised that Apple didn't goose its whole line of displays by a hundred bucks or more. It's a little sad that this falls into the "counting one's blessings" category, but hey, no one ever said that technolust would be easy.