Another Stevenote come and gone, and man, it was a doozy, wasn't it? Sorry about the delay before our official reaction, but we wanted to make sure we watched the whole QuickTime stream of Steve's big annual SF throwdown before we said anything. And now we have-- yes, even that six-hour demonstration of Tiger's Spotlight technology-- and so we're pumped so full of time-delayed Reality Distortion Field energy that we glow in the dark. Why, knowing the half-life of this stuff, it'll be days before the radiation dies down and we can finally turn a critical eye toward Apple's various and sundry new products. In the meantime, we're just going to ride the wave, surrender to unconditional hero worship, and drool so much we flirt with dangerous levels of dehydration.

We know it's not fashionable to focus on the "M"-word when there are new iPod products to fawn over, but what the hey: we're giving the Mac mini top billing. After all, this is significant stuff; the mini is Apple's least expensive computer ever (even counting the Apple II line), and it represents the Mac platform's first true foray into that segment of the modern consumer market labeled by top economists as the "Cheap-Ass Skinflint" sector. Honestly, who would have ever thought that any of us would live to see Apple selling a full-fledged Mac OS X system complete with iLife digital hub apps and more or less a full complement of ports for just $499? Sure, it only packs a G4 processor, but it ought to have plenty enough ooomph to handle most consumers' day-to-day digital lifestyle tasks without turning blue and falling over.

And boy howdy, if you thought the iMac G5 was obviously designed to capitalize on the iPod "halo effect," with the Mac mini all subtlety has gone straight out the window. Sure, the iMac looks more like an iPod in a dock, but the Mac mini screams "hey Wintellians, try me on for size!" with every particle of its being from its concept outward. After all, if a Wintel user is willing to spend an average of about $300 for an iPod (and last quarter, well over 4 million of them did), it's not much of a stretch to think that a fair chunk of that market might also plunk down $500 for a small and sleek virus-free computer that can handle just about any digital lifestyle task they can throw at it.

The whole "Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard, and Mouse" thing invites Wintel users to reuse their existing hardware to lower their cost of entry. They can spring for a cheap display and input devices if they like, or buy a KVM switch to share their Wintel's I/O gear with the Mac mini, which is teensy enough to fit into any existing Wintel environment. Heck, that might be the ideal "stealth switcher" setup; use the Wintel for games and Windows-only apps, and then flick a switch and use Mac OS X for digital photography, video editing, music composition, iPod management, Internet tasks, etc. Eventually they might find that they're hardly ever switching back. If Apple's smart, it'll offer a bundle promo that gives a discount on any Mac mini purchased with a Belkin 2-Port KVM Switch.

Only time will tell if Apple's grand experiment with targeting the low-end market will work, but the fact that the "aimed at Wintel iPod-users" iMac G5 has become the company's top-selling Mac bodes well for the mini's future sales figures. And how cool is it that the mini just so happens to be a Power Mac G4 Cube that got caught in a hydraulic press? Apple yoinked its award-winning Cube from the market when it became clear that no one wanted to drop well over a thousand clams for a Mac with such limited expansion capabilities, but the company said the Cube might return someday in some other form-- and now it has. One third the Cube at one third the price: now that sounds like a recipe for success. Geez, we're even thinking of picking one up for the kid's room. And maybe one for the living room. And kitchen. At $499, how can you go wrong? Maybe Apple will start selling them in six-packs...

Boy, the Cheap-Ass Skinflints sure had a banner day, didn't they? Because in addition to being able to buy a modern Mac for just $499, now they can also join the rest of us in iPod Nation (ten million strong and growing!) for only 99 smackers. Yes, the flashPod rumors were right on the money, and the iPod shuffle is shipping now in $99 and $149 configurations, meaning that customers can now enjoy portable digital music for less than half the cost of an iPod mini (albeit with an eighth of the mini's storage). Sure, it doesn't hold all that many songs, but it holds more than its competition, and for a lower price-- plus, it's tiny, weighs next to nothing, requires zero cables or disposable batteries, and best of all, if you get hungry, you can eat it. Oh, and it comes with white earbuds, meaning that customers can score with iPod groupies for a fraction of the original entry cost.

On the whole "screenless" thing, well, we were a little skeptical, but Apple did it: they built a player that holds up to 240 songs, and yet basically doesn't let you pick which one you want to hear. The idea is that so many people just use shuffle-play all the time anyway, why not sell an iPod that more or less relies on that behavior to be a viable product? Your control is limited to skipping forward or back one track at a time, either in playlist order or (preferably) at random. That's considerably less control than the competition offers; sure, their controls and screens may suck rocks out loud, but at least they let you listen to "Unskinny Bop" if (for some reason) you want to and you're willing to wrestle with the crappy interface to get to it. The iPod shuffle's edibleness might not be a strong enough feature to compensate.

It's a gutsy move, but if anyone can pull it off, it's Apple-- and truth be told, we do tend to listen to just one or two playlists on our iPods on any given day, and usually on shuffle play. So if the public can relinquish its illusion of control to the fates, this little slab o' white plastic has a good shot at boosting Apple's share of the portable player market still higher into the stratosphere. Personally, we expect a fair number of them will be bought by existing iPod owners as sort of their "big" iPod's lil' buddy; it's perfect for those times when you only need to tote a dozen or two albums' worth of tunage with you instead of your whole collection. Let's say you're skiing, or something-- are you really going to do anything with your iPod other than toss on a playlist and occasionally skip tracks? Exactly. And since you can eat the iPod shuffle, you won't even need to pack a PowerBar.

But regardless of how you do use it, the issue of how you can use it raises an interesting question: is the iPod shuffle really an iPod? Obviously from a marketing perspective, an iPod is whatever Apple says is an iPod, but does that really stand in a deeper philosophical sense? The iPod is now a cultural icon, and it resides in the gestalt consciousness as "the thing that lets you carry all your music everywhere you go"-- and unless your music collection is pretty freakin' anemic, an iPod shuffle with a 240-song capacity ain't gonna qualify. So there's a chance that Apple is watering down the iPod's identity with the iPod shuffle.

Then again, some of us thought that the 4 GB iPod mini might do that, too, and that obviously never happened-- and of course, if your personal definition of "iPod" is "stylish white and/or metallic thing that plays music through charisma-boosting white earbuds," then you're covered anyway. At the end of the day, it's more than likely that the iPod brand and cachet will turn the shufflePod into a raging success in spite of its limited song capacity. After all, anyone who wants to carry more songs would have bought a regular iPod anyway, right? The bottom line is this: the shufflePod is white, it's stylish, it has the trademark iPod earbuds, it autosyncs with iTunes, it's teeny-tiny and feather-light, and it makes for a tasty snack when the hunger is pokin' atcha pokin' atcha. What's not to love?

Oops, wait, this just in: literally six dozen AtAT viewers have now written in pointing out that the footnotes on Apple's web page include the command, "Do not eat iPod shuffle." To which we can only reply to Apple: you ain't the boss of us. Now where'd we put that ketchup?

So much for the Stevenote hardware; what about the software? Well, as it turns out, there was a metric ton of it, and it looks pretty darn good, too. The obvious release, of course, was iLife '05; iLife debuted at last year's Stevenote, conspicuously stamped with the "'04" tag, so the only people not expecting an update to an '05 edition at this year's event were most likely the same people who were also shocked to discover that Steve wore a black mock turtleneck for the occasion, that Phil Schiller gave an onstage software demo, and that Earth has an atmosphere largely breathable by humans (for now). But is it worth shelling out $79 (up from $49 for '04; must be the weak dollar) for Apple's latest collection of digital lifestyle applications?

Well, like everything, that depends. There are certainly some compelling new features in each new iLife app, but whether or not they're compelling enough to part you from 79 bones is something you'll have to decide for yourself. For example, Steve says that 2005 is the Year of High-Definition Video; that's as may be, but unless you already own a high-def camcorder like that $3500 Sony rig that Steve was gushing about onstage (or you plan to buy one before iLife '06 ships), the new HD support in iMovie HD probably won't mean squat, so it's up to you whether the app's improved performance, enhanced tools and transitions, and new "Magic iMovie" mode (which sucks down your DV footage, automatically adds titles, transitions, and background music, and spits out a passably cool edited flick) are worth the price of admission.

Apply the same logic to the rest of the iLife apps and you'll have a pretty clear answer about whether or not you need to budget $79 for the upgrade: are you tired of iDVD's existing themes, and will OneStep DVD creation save you time? Will album folders, RAW support, slicker editing, way slicker slideshows, and new book-creation options make iPhoto that much more of a joy to use? Do you have an actual garage band that would justify GarageBand's new 8-track simultaneous recording, or does its new real-time musical notation make your heart sing? Only you can decide. Personally, we're still on the fence; if GarageBand had included the ability to use more than one tempo in a single song (and if Asteroid had shipped) it'd be a no-brainer for us, but heck, we'll probably wind up dropping the cash just for the funky new iPhoto features.

If you don't blow $79 on iLife '05, though, you won't have to scrounge up still more cash to spend on iWork '05-- yes, it exists, and by some strange coincidence, it's also $79. And just like the rumors said, it consists of Keynote 2 for all your presentation needs (trust us, if it's good enough to power a Stevenote, it's good enough for your quarterly sales presentation), and a brand spankin' new app called Pages, which Apple describes as word processor with an "incredible sense of style." More prosaically it might be described as a lowish-end page layout app with Apple's attention to detail and ease of use, but aside from the glitzy real-time text-flow while you drag graphics around the page and the built-in themes that make attractive layout a snap, it does appear to handle some slightly more advanced word processing issues like tables of contents, footnotes, and bibliographies, so it may well serve just fine even if you're cranking out a dissertation on Kant instead of a trifold color brochure for the swim team bake sale.

Clearly iWork isn't looking to take on Office anytime soon, of course; from a consumer perspective, right now it arguably trumps PowerPoint and gives Word a run for its money (depending entirely on how you use them), but from a business standpoint it's a little lacking. A spreadsheet app is nowhere in sight, and we're told that at least some cubicle-dwellers actually use Excel for crunching numbers instead of just making grids of text. As an AppleWorks replacement it looks pretty snazzy, but it does lack some of AppleWorks's functionality (so far), and we're a little disappointed that it apparently won't ship standard on any Macs, but if your productivity is limited mostly to text and visuals, by all means, give iWork a try. And hey, if nothing else, at least this means that Keynote got cheaper.