Today's Apple Announcements: Lesser-Covered Tidbits

Hidden within the long-expected news of Apple’s belated, upgraded iLife and iWork ‘08 suites (there were no ‘07 versions) and iMacs were some additional nuggets that it’d be a shame to overlook. Henceforth:

• .Mac account owners such as myself now get a 10x boost in storage capacity and a 4x bump in per-month allowable bandwidth. Formerly long-in-the-tooth (and still arguably non-competitive) .Mac benefits from much-needed modernization, a particularly important upgrade given its $99 per-year pricetag as compared to no-cost alternatives.
• Back at the end of last year, I noted that Apple hadn’t yet transitioned its Mac mini product line to Intel’s Core microarchitecture CPUs (also known by their frankly confusing marketing moniker, Core 2). I guess (literally….I’m postulating here) Apple’s CPU supplier’s desire to end-of-life old products finally had its desired effect. I’m quite fond of the Mac mini’s form factor, I must confess, and I’m therefore glad to see the system’s not dead, as many Apple followers had prognosticated might be the case in advance of today’s intro event.
• Last Thursday’s cover story noted that Apple’s Airport Extreme N Base Station only offered 100 Mbps LAN and WAN ports, while its Buffalo competitor was 1 GbE all the way around. Apple’s just fixed that specification shortcoming (or at least it says it did); I’ll attempt to persuade my PR contact to swap me out for an upgraded unit and, if I’m successful, I’ll retest to see if it fares better than its predecessor under TCP and/or UDP.