The miniPod is cool, no doubt, but can we be honest? It just wasn't the star of the show. Neither was the long-awaited G5 Xserve, for that matter, nor guitar-slingin' demo boy John Mayer, nor even Srinidi Varadarajan of the Virginia Tech Big Mac project (although we admit we were all yelling "SRINIIIII!!! WOOO!!! YEAH!!!" and holding up lighters when his video spot came on). For us, only one thing that shared the stage with Steve came close to matching his radiance, and that was GarageBand.

You might remember the GarageBand rumors from last September, when someone at MacRumors came across Apple's trademark application floating around in the soup of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. Speculation ran rampant, since the name could have referred to just about anything even vaguely related to music. Allow us to pretend we knew what the heck we were talking about, then, when we posited that it might be "some sort of add-on that turns a Mac into a passable recording studio rig for cheap," because that's basically what it is: the fifth leg of Apple's $49 iLife suite which combines the dynamic looping elements of Soundtrack, dozens of software-based virtual instruments, and a digital recording studio that lets you capture and tweak your own special sound. Okay, so the description lacks oomph; you really need to see it-- and hear it-- in action. If you haven't sat through the keynote yet, we strongly recommend that you tune in and see what all the fuss is about.

So is this just another niche product? Maybe, but Steve has a point: if half the households in the U.S. contain at least one player of a musical instrument, that's pretty good odds at a viable audience-- and if the Mac population includes a disproportionately high number of musicians, which we suspect it might, well, so much the better. Besides, remember when iMovie first came out? Only about four people even owned a MiniDV camcorder at that time, and none of them was thinking about desktop video; now that was a niche. The same goes with authoring your own DVDs, because when iDVD first came out the SuperDrive only existed in the high-end $3000 Power Mac G4. These days, though, MiniDV camcorders are everywhere and even standalone DVD recorders are filtering down into the consumer mainstream. And since a lone cellist can now build an entire virtual string quartet (or a whole freakin' orchestra), who's to say that GarageBand won't increase the number of active musicians out there?

Whatever. Maybe we're just flabbergasted because of the timing: we've actually got an electric guitar UPS-Grounding its way across the country to us right now, which means we apparently bought something at just about the right time for once. We'll let you know if we're still as psyched once we're pumping that thing through the British Invasion virtual amp.