“What do you get when you put up to 2GHz of pure Intel Core Duo power, an iSight camera, Front Row, iLife ’06, and a 13-inch glossy widescreen display into a sleek case? More than you thought possible for less than you thought possible. Meet MacBook, starting at $1099.”

The biggest surprise appears to be the Intel Core Duo and the minimum 13″ screen. Mmmmm want one!

Keep up the good work……

Updates include; MacIntel support, New AJAX HTTP interface, MSN and Growl “Now playing” plugins and they have done ‘Loads of bugfixes’.

It might be worth all you gamers from holding fire just yet though. Michael over at Binary Bonsai has got the system up and running on his Mac Mini and as suspected this clearly isn’t gonna be the Mac gaming rig of choice. Early reports on the iMac are proving to be much better and when the video drivers are optimised results are likely to be much improved.

Interestingly, hot on the heels of Apple’s announcement though, the ‘get Linux running on everything’ community very quickly established that the first few stages of a Linux installation were possible. A complete install can not be far away, though the specific drivers are not thought to be available for a complete install at this stage.

Whatever the intention, though clearly tongue in cheek it emphasises the polar difference in branding and design these two rival companies employ. It is well worth checking out.

Apple has been working with at least two other companies to perfect the digital click wheel display technology. While not all the engineering was completed in-house by Apple, sources have said Apple could hold an exclusive license on the technologies it borrowed from other developers for a period of time, limiting the ability of competitors to copy Apple’s design.

With the PSP, it will be surely signify the mainstream acceptance of portable video as a realistic medium and for corporations as a relevant revenue stream. ITunes has sold well over a million videos since the launch but numbers will increase exponentially with the release of this of this. I can’t wait!

- I mentioned something along these lines for 2006 here.

The hot subject since Macworld and IMO the most important thing is the capability to dual boot OS X with Windows and it appears they aren’t making it that easy at the moment. While it looks pretty likely someone is gonna bust this open sooner or later currently it doesn’t look possible. Personally, its probably gonna mean me spending the premium when they do because I am sold on the styling and need to really find out what all the fuss is about with Macs. Being a Windows geek, I can’t give it up and I can’t justify having another box in the house but dual booting would give me a chance to dip my toe in the water!

Steve Jobs’ keynote began by running over the little matter of the sales figures for the holiday quarter. By anyone’s estimation 2004 holiday quarter was a good one with 4.5m Ipods sold by that pales into insignificance in 2005 – 14m Ipods sold which works out at 100 every minute 24 hours a day for three months. Getting this into perspective, this obviously included the budget Shuffle and the svelte Nano (though the Mini was available) which were released in 2005 but this is still awesome figures!