See? Sometimes it pays to broadcast super-late. Uncle Steve's iTunes Music Store anniversary conference call isn't slated to start for hours yet, but somehow we have an inkling of what he might want to talk about. First, at about 1 AM EDT, faithful viewer charles noticed that the iTMS was "temporarily unavailable," and when it came back a little before 2, faithful viewer Michael Wyszomierski informed us of all sorts of funky fresh new flava bursting forth from the New and Improved™ store. Trust us, it's like a party in your mouth and everyone's invited.

Check it out, right there in the middle of the storefront there's a link to information about a brand spankin' new iTunes 4.5, and the features just keep right on coming. Take, for example, "Single of the Week." Apparently Apple's going to be giving away "great music from emerging artists" every Tuesday from now on. Sure, the song of any given week might not be up your alley, but it's free, so you have no right to complain. (Which is also, coincidentally enough, why any hate mail we get about our lateness/lameness/poor personal hygiene habits are merrily dispatched to the Trash with a grin.) The first free song appears to be a Foo Fighters track, but at broadcast time the whole "free" thing didn't appear to be working yet. That's okay, we can wait. We have the patience of ten men. Ten really, really impatient men.

But wait, there's more: a new "iMix" feature lets you "publish your playlists for all the world to see" (although, as far as we can make out, not "for all the world to hear"). Go on, come out of the closet on that whole Spice Girls addiction. We're sure all the world will understand. And if they don't, who needs 'em? Especially since you can hole up with iTunes 4.5 and just watch music videos and movie trailers all day long. Or poke around through the "most-played tunes on your favorite radio station" chosen from the charts of over 1,200 stations nationwide.

Now how much would you pay? Well, don't answer yet, because we're just getting started. Have you ever wanted something like the iPod's on-the-go playlist on your desktop? Then you'll probably dig Party Shuffle, "a new dynamic playlist that's always on and ready to party." (Who wrote this copy, the guy who did the "Monster Ballads" commercials? "They taught us how to love!!") Now you can apparently queue songs up as you're listening, which is just the thing for madcap revellers who don't want to be tied down to one of those stodgy static playlists.

And if you order within the next ten minutes, Apple will throw in still more magic-- like a lossless encoder (finally!) which lets you rip your CDs at full quality and store them in half the space, automatic CD insert printing that builds nifty montages from album art of the included songs, a Wish List feature to make it all that much easier to blow all your cash on music downloads, links from your own music library to related music at the iTMS to make it all that much easier to blow more than all your cash on music downloads, and-- ready for this?-- Windows Media support. Well, sort of. You can import existing WMA files, assuming they're unprotected (meaning, no Napster/Walmart/MusicMatch tracks) and you're using iTunes for Windows. Awww, it's Windows-only? Boo hoo hoo, we're crushed. Or we would be, if there were a single Mac user on the planet who actually had the poor taste to have a library of WMA music in the first place.

Oh, jeez-- we almost forgot to mention the changes to the iTMS usage rights! The bad news is, the limit on the number of times you can burn a given playlist containing iTMS tracks to CD has dropped from 10 to 7. The good news is that not many people are likely to want seven burned copies of a single playlist anyway, unless they're illegally distributing them to others-- and who would do such a heinous thing? Anyway, the better news is that the number of computers you can authorize to play your protected music just went up from 3 to 5, which has us hooting with joy here at the AtAT compound, where we have way too many Macs for our own good kicking around. At least now we can use a couple more of them as remote music terminals.

Whew, that's a whole lotta stuff. iTunes 4.5 is indeed available immediately; we're happily rockin' out with it right now. (Party Shuffle has obligingly chosen A Flock of Seagulls alongside Dinah Washington, Talking Heads, and Bikini Kill.) So far our only big complaint is that apparently the little circle-arrow links in the Library only link to the iTMS, when it'd be much more useful if, say, an option-click linked to all songs of the artist or album in the Library itself. Oh, wait-- we just tried it, and it does. Never mind. Everything's perfect. Go download. And here's hoping Steve wasn't expecting any of this to be a surprise come 11:30 AM EDT, because if he was, he's gonna be in one baaaaaaad mood.

Clearly the iTunes 4.5 announcement is going to overshadow pretty much every other nugget o' news in Macdom for a little while, so it's probably a good thing that nothing much else is happening, right? Especially since it lets us drop back and punt by revisiting a throwaway gag we made in yesterday's episode, but which, it turns out, may have some basis in reality. Or at least an alternate universe's reality. Bizarro reality. Whatever.

The gag we're talking about is that thing we said about how AirPort Update 3.4.1 might lead to a "dramatically increased RF output that cooks your kidneys after thirty minutes of continued use." Just hi-freakin'-larious stuff, right? We know, but it's the best we can scrape together at 4 AM. Well, while AirPort 3.4.1 apparently causes no such increase in radiation (and does fix most of the issues reported with the AirPort Update 3.4 of Death), apparently high- and low-level radiation fields emanating from laptop computers are a real concern with eco-friendly types-- at least in Germany. Faithful viewer joernl forwarded us an article from a German magazine called Öko-test, which decided to test a bunch of laptops to see how much radiation they, um, radiate.

Check out the Babelfish autotranslation if you need to, but joernl was kind enough to fill us in on the basic facts. Apparently, in stark contrast to our prediction of AirPort 3.4.1 boiling internal organs in vivo, Apple's iBook was the only tested system that kicked low-emissions kiester: "Only one equipment in the test, that with the new operating system Mac OS X 10,3 Panther equipped Notebook iBook G4 of the manufacturer Apple, keeps all TCO limit values and may therefore with the note 'very well' in the strahlenmessung decorate itself." For comparison's sake, three other notebooks were rated "satisfying," three more were "sufficiently" (!), and one was "unsatisfactory." Wow, the magazine isn't kidding when it states that "the wackeren folding computers produce often an unpleasant mix from electrical and magnetic fields." Those darn wackeren folding computers.

We can't say whether PowerBooks are as low-radiation as the iBooks are, but it still feels good to know that Apple's got a laptop that's far less likely to cause unpleasant cellular mutation than offerings from the Wintel crowd. And hey, is anyone surprised that the single "unsatisfactory" laptop, which joernl tells us kicks out ten times the recommended radiation limits, is a Dell Inspiron 510m? According to Öko-test, the Dell spits out radiation "within four ranges over the limit values," which we don't quite understand, but lordy, it can't be good.

Suddenly the whole "Dude, you're getting a Dell" thing starts to make sense: Steve the Dell Dude only acted like a simpering moron because he'd suffered radiation-related brain damage. (Clearly that was medical marijuana he was buying.) And hey, could this explain the behavior of those feeble-minded Dell interns, too-- and, dare we say, perhaps even the psychosis of the company's Steve-obsessed CEO? You heard it here first; apparently excessive radiation exposure causes idiocy, dementia, and rampant mediocrity. Alert the EPA.

For the record, no, we don't own any game consoles. While we have relatives who actually own all three of the Holy Triumvirate (PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube), the last dedicated video game system any of us owned was a secondhand Sega Game Gear from sometime back in the late Cretaceous Period. So our continued interest in the upcoming Xbox 2 seems unnatural, because even if we were going to drop a couple hundred clams on a game system we'd never have time to play, it's pretty unlikely we'd pick the one system that would require forking the dough straight over to Microsoft, who we generally figure has plenty enough filthy lucre without getting any more from us, thank you very much.

Still, this continued saga of Microsoft allegedly ditching the Xbox's current x86 roots for some sort of PowerPC-derived processor in the console's sequel is gripping stuff, if you happen to be wired in that specific compulsive-Mac-geek sort of way. And here's the latest development in the story: faithful viewer David Poves notes that The Register dug up some Chinese forum post on a site called GZeasy which alleges to have an actual tech schematic of the Xbox 2.

We aren't technically qualified to judge whether said schematic is even remotely viable as a legit example of Microsoft design, although the total lack of crayon marks makes us a tad suspicious. Still, let's assume for a moment that it's the Real Deal™, because the most interesting bit is at the top of the diagram where there are clearly three "3.5+ GHz CPU" cores listed. While it doesn't say anything about whether they're x86 or PowerPC, The Reg seems to think that since "the CPU is linked to main memory via a traditional North Bridge," at the very least it can't be an Athlon 64. And since the CPUs are known to be 64-bit and made by IBM, this is quite possibly more evidence (however dodgy) that the Xbox 2 will indeed be powered by a trio of G5s or something derived from them. After all, we don't suppose there are exactly a ton of mass-produced, non-G5, non-Athlon 64 chip architectures floating around out there.

Basically, we're going to be obsessing about this until Microsoft comes clean on just what sort of chips are going to be in that freakin' thing, because so far all the reports claiming one thing or another are "questionable." And aside from the whole "wanting to see PowerPC beat x86 out of an important platform" thing, we're also anxious to see if analyst Rob Enderle can break the streak of a lifetime and be actually be correct for once when predicting that the Xbox 2 will be AMD-based. We all have a vested interest in seeing how that particular situation resolves, because, you know, if Rob ever is right with one of his predictions, we're all going to perish in the ensuing spontaneous total collapse of the universe. So get interested, already.