Matt Deatherage of the MDJ said:.
Security updates always bump other stories, but we're still working on several big ones. The post-Expo lull seems to have caught everyone - to date, we haven't found a single report noting that every day since Wednesday, Apple's stock eclipsed its previous all-time split-adjusted high price of US$72.10 per share from 2000.03.22.

The new all-time high was set Friday (2005.01.28) at US$73.98 per share, topping Thursday's closing price of US$72.64 and Wednesday's US$72.25 per share. It may not stop there, and we're continuing to work on the real news in Apple's December quarter results as we keep an eye on these metrics.

It baffles me that the press spent so much ink on Apple's "rising" stock price in early January, only to bail on the story when it finally hits the mark.

Has no one picked up on the Powerbook revs? Who was expecting that so quickly? And me just buying mine 3 weeks ago. DOH!
New Powerbook Revs

from the "not-everything-that-can-be-done-is-worth-doing-department"

Read About It Here
There's only a couple of problems, he had to hack the heatsink with a saw, and the internal Combo/Super drive won't fit after the mod. So much for fitting a "full-featured" PC in to a Mini case. Oh, and the Motherboard is a "preproduction prototype" not available in sales channels a this time. No comments on heat issues or actual preformance were made. Just that he was able to physically fit it into the case. And the comments section is filled with comment spam. Yay. He also didn't comment on how much it actually cost to make this mod, probably more than the Mini cost to begin with...

Regards,
+SnipeR+

Buy.com is having a sale on the M9268LL/A 4th Generation 40GB iPod w/ click wheel for $379.99. This iPod holds up to 10,000 songs (AAC four minutes each), and shipping is Free. It's the best current price I have found. Click here for product page.

San Francisco MacWorld 05 is over. Steve Job's reality distortion field should be now just wearing off. If your head is still spinning it's probably just the jet-lag or the ravaging effects of so much partying. Time to detox and assess what's really happened at the show and see if we can guess the direction(s) Apple is headed.
First off, this was a very different kind of show. From the keynote to the partitioned Mosconi expo floor I get the since that the state of the Mac is healthy but Apple has made another step on a march towards maker of consumer electronic appliances and away from niche computer platform for the creative arts geek. Yeah... that's me, but am I worried?
If Apple made toasters and those toasters produced the singed bread products in the quantities and quality I require I'd be very happy with my toaster. I wouldn't join a usergroup... it's heard to get excited about a toaster... toast isn't cutting edge. But everybody owns one!. Is it elitist to like all the newest technologies... even if they had to be quickly reinvented to work on the mac... seamlessly integrated and "working" together on hardware that was reasonably state of the art. Toesters never crash, Toasters have a great UGI. Toasters are the best way to scorch warm scrummy toast!
Although the dual G5 towers look most like toasters, did any of you ever think 'Man, I want one of those in my kitchen!'? Well, that was my first thought upon seeing the mini... and I already have a G4 iMac lamp on my kitchen dinette.

My mom is not a geek. I would consider her a typical computer user — she is able to learn to do specific tasks she wants to do and has specific uses for her machine. She uses it for things like online banking, simple word processing, e-mail, reading about certain topics on the web, and so on. She has no idea what the term "headless" means and doesn't know the difference between a CD and a DVD. She just wants a computer that works and is simple to use. She's a perfect candidate to own a Mac.

Until the summer of 2004, my mother used my old PC, a home-built 233 MHz Pentium MMX machine running Windows 98, that I gave her before I replaced it with a home-built 550 MHz Pentium III system in 1999. Her machine had a 15-inch CRT monitor, a 1.08 GB hard drive, 256MB RAM, a typical sound card (the specs of which I can't remember), and a Matrox graphics card. It was a good machine for its time, and it had done what mom needed it to do. At some point, my brother used it for a week or so and it became infested with the worst porn spyware I'd ever seen, and no amount of cleaning by AdAware, Spybot S&D, or other anti-spyware software could completely clean it off. Since the machine was more than 6 years old, since the drive was running out of space, since the monitor was getting soft, almost to the point of being unreadable, since the machine had been made unbearably slow by spyware that couldn't be removed and wouldn't stop coming, I decided she needed a new machine.

Mom is not a person of many means, so it was up to me to purchase a machine for her as a gift. Had the Mac mini been available at the time, it certainly would have been a Mac model I would have considered. The rest of this case study is intended to be a thought experiment of sorts, going back in time and applying current products to past circumstances. To state it another way, if mom still owned that same aged PC today, how would the Mac mini stand up as a replacement option? After all, switchers with old or broken PCs are part of Apple's stated target market for the device. Apple intends switchers to drop the Mac mini in place of the PC with the current display, keyboard, and mouse still in tact. Would that have worked for mom?

To read the full article, please check out the full text at aaronadams.net.

The plural of anecdote is not data. As a Mac user, I've exposed a number of people to Macs who otherwise never would have bothered looking at one. Many of those people are interested in trying out a Mac if they can find the combination of price and features they like.

Many in the Mac community have heralded the concept of a headless Mac, now known as the Mac mini, as Apple's one needed giant step toward attracting switchers. Now that the product is out there and Windows users have had a chance to digest the information, I intend to provide a series of case studies where I question potential switchers I'm acquainted with in an attempt to discover their thoughts about the Mac mini. What I present is anecdotal evidence at best, taken from a small but, I believe, valid cross-section of computer users who represent potential switchers. As I have no way to collect actual, verifiable data, anecdotes will have to do.

My first case study is Scott, a long-time Windows-using friend of mine who I spoke to first about a possible Mac mini purchase. Below I state my thesis, and then present Scott's circumstances, options, and opinions, and leave the comparison between my thesis and Scott's situation up to the reader.

To read the full article, please check out the full text at aaronadams.net.

Prior to this year's Macworld. I was very sure that the rumors of a headless Mac were untrue simply because the product idea made so little sense. Now that the Mac mini is a reality, I still think it's a product that doesn't make much sense in a number of ways. The Mac mini may be priced at $499 at the outset, but turning it into a usable computer by attaching a display, keyboard, and mouse turns out, in many situations, to add logistical complications and additional expense to these boxes right out of the gate. (Also, most users' desire for additional RAM will make the Mac mini initially more expensive than the $499 price tag.) The idea of an inexpensive headless Mac isn't the panacea some fantasize it to be — in fact, it may be the opposite. The Mac mini will be a mediocre seller at best and could end up being Apple's biggest mistake since the Cube.

Why do I have such a bleak outlook on the Mac mini? The answer to that question is rather involved and includes a number of elements such as Apple marketing, other Apple products, and Windows users' expectations.

To read the full article, please check out the full text at aaronadams.net.