My oh my, this certainly has been a week chock full of urgent activity, hasn't it? No doubt you're teetering on the brink of total physical and emotional collapse; practically every day you've been bombarded with demands such as "Quick! Go check out this AirPort Express thing!" or "Hurry! Install the new Security Update right away!" or "Just look at those new Power Macs! Go! NOW!!" or even the seemingly off-topic "Go fix me a turkey pot pie!" Well, calm down, buddy; we're here to tell you that the action has wound down, so you can finally let go of some of that tension and relax.

That is, right after you go download iTunes 4.6. Right now. Make haste, or all is lost! Nothing less than the fate of the universe itself hangs in the balance! AAAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Yes, as kindly pointed out by faithful viewer Lynch Allison, the update to which Apple alluded earlier in the week has now graced us with its presence-- either right on time or two days late, depending on whether you're going by Apple's press release or Steve Jobs himself. And the reason it's so vital that you upgrade as soon as humanly possible is that iTunes 4.6 adds support for AirPort Express, so until you run the updater, you won't be able to take advantage of the spiffing new tune-beaming technology known as AirTunes. Oh, sure, certain overly-laid-back individuals have told us to chill because AirPort Express's mid-July ship date constitutes a far greater impediment to the successful deployment of AirTunes, but we figure it's best we focus on these issues one at a time, right?

Besides, what's wrong with a little overzealous planning for the future? Consider Jason Snell over at Macworld; AirPort Express won't ship for over a month, yet, and he's already asking "where does Apple go next?" It's pretty clear, after all, that AirTunes won't begin and end with its initial iTunes-to-Airport Express incarnation; it's a really useful thing for some people, but others will find it pointless. For us, it's darn near perfect. Since we get seizures and a rash if we lose our line of sight to the TV, we've got two PowerBooks and an iBook that rarely leave the living room, so we're thrilled that we can shell out $129 and play music from any of them wirelessly through the same set of speakers. But for people who only have a single iMac sitting in a room on the other side of the house, having to tromp upstairs and down the hall every time they want to change what's playing hardly seems worth the price-- unless it winds up being enough exercise to let them cancel their membership down at the gym.

Anyway, Jason's conclusion is one that's occurred to a lot of people since Monday's announcement: what if, instead of interfacing only with iTunes, AirPort Express could receive a broadcast from iPods as well? After all, the iPod is made to be portable (duh), so wouldn't it be six kinds of nifty if the fourth-generation model allegedly slated for shipment this fall included 802.11 wireless networking and a menu item to choose which in-range AirPort Express unit it should use to play its music? As an added bonus, it could also play Internet radio and stream songs from shared iTunes libraries.

Sadly, there are all sorts of reasons why this probably isn't going to happen as early as this fall, battery life chief among them-- AirPort sucks down a lot of power and the iPod already gets bagged on for its arguably skimpy eight hours of play time. There's also the fact that AirPort Express accepts its music as encrypted Apple Lossless audio data, which means the iPod would have to decode a given song from MP3 or AAC or whatever, re-encode it as Apple Lossless, and encrypt it all on the fly. That's a fair amount of processing going on, which equates to sticking faster processors or dedicated encoding/encryption chips in the iPod, which raises the price and-- again-- drains battery life.

Still, dare to dream. Meanwhile, you have installed that iTunes 4.6 update, right? You haven't? But-- but-- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!