Interestingly, it would seem that Apple did experiment with the idea of adding a cellphone functionality to the existing "classic" iPod OS.

In July 2006, peeking in a firmware upgrade for the iPod Nano 1st gen, I found several references to cellphones features, such as "t_feature_app_PHONE_APP", "kPhoneSignalStrength" and "clPhoneCallHistoryModel".

I posted my findings in the Appleinsider forum, which were then turned into an article which was referenced in many other tech news outlets.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/06/07/17/iphone_ipod_messenger_clues_in_latest_ipod_software.html

As far as I know, it was the first concrete and verifiable proof that Apple was indeed working on making their own phone, capitalizing on the success of the iPod.

I think that the APPL stock made a noticeable jump upward that day, I wish I could've made a quick investment before posting these information. At the time, people were rarely looking inside firmware/OS upgrade looking for information about future Apple products, but now it's not uncommon.

@wyrdone said: "We are still many many years away from creating anything close to being able to have the processing power needed for anything fully sentient"

Uhm? Sentience is not about having enough processing power.

About the iPhone "Kill Switch". The iPhone doesn't send your GPS location to Apple, and it doesn't even send your application list to Apple. All it does is check a publicly available xml file on Apple's server and then check (internally) if one of your app has been blacklisted.

This xml file has always been "empty" since it was discovered. Apple never used the killswitch to remove apps on people's iPhone despite removing/banning quite a few apps from the app store. People that bought these apps prior were able to keep them. Apple said that the kill switch would be used only to remove really malicious programs and there's nothing that show that Apple would do otherwise.

And BTW, the holly Android platform also includes a Kill Switch that despite its "open source" nature you can only remove by "rooting" the device (which is as complicated as Jailbreaking an iPhone).

If you examine the .xml file that iTunes use when it checks for updates, you'll see that 5A345 is listed as having the same "MobileDeviceSoftwareVersions" parameters as 5A347.

Parameters for 5A347 include only a "Restore" sub-node but no "Update" sub-node like previous versions had. That means that iTunes won't prompt you for an update if you plug an iPhone with 5A345 on it (and neither with 5A347), but if you restore an iPhone that has 5A345, you should get 5A347 without even knowing it (both are labeled 2.0).

You can download the .xml update file at http://phobos.apple.com/version you'll have to download it and use an .xml viewer like the Property List Editor to make some sense of it.

"Actually, it's not just the percentage of users, but the likelihood that a Mac-targetted virus would be slowed down by any sensible, security-minded users. It is the percentage of users that don't assume their system to be invincible."

Well that's where you're wrong.

Mac users stating that Macs are invincible to viruses mostly exist in your head.

I challenge you to find an instance of a post or comment on the whole interweb from a Mac user stating that Macs are invulnerable to viruses. At best you'll find some comment made by a sarcastic Mac basher, or a 10 year old kid, and even those are extremely rare.

I think that this belief (that these people exist) comes from the fact that some Mac users may have stated that "Macs don't get viruses". Well this has been true for the last 6 years. People saying that don't imply that they are invulnerable, or that they will never get any.

I guess it's interpreted as an invulnerability claim by some people that used a platform that has been attacked by tens of thousands of viruses.

If there was in fact a Mac virus attack, news about it along with instruction to prevent/fix it would circulate very quickly on the internet, and Mac news outlets wouldn't downplay the threat if it was anything serious.

"I know what you're sayin Scott, but CD's have a WAV file on them, no? That WAV file is uncompressed and has no data associated with it other than the music (no digital rights crap). So, while it is "digital" because it is made up of 100101011101, I think it still falls into the category of "the analog hole"... dont even know what your talking about in the comments, I just thought I'd throw that out there."

CDs don't have WAV files on them. CDs contain audio in a format that's called "Red Book Audio". It's similar to WAV because of the fact that it's uncompressed Digital audio with no DRM. But whatever, that was not your point.

Your point about "the analog hole" doesn't make any sense, you don't seem to understand what it's about.

The "analog hole" arises from the fact that all audio players have to output analog audio at some point for them to be heard. No matter what the source is, digital, analog, with or without DRM, an analog signal is needed to make your headphones or speakers vibrate and create sound that's heard by your ears, which are an analog device.

So no matter how hard to break a particular audio copy protection system is, there is always a way to record using whatever device (analog or digital based) the output of the player to make a copy that doesn't have this protection. And if you record using a loss-less method and a good setup, you can get a near perfect copy. That's what the analog hole is about.

Here's what Jobs had to say a few months ago about YouTube on the iPhone:

-----------------------------

from: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/ultimate-iphone-faqs-list-part-2/

Markoff: “What about YouTube–”

Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”

-----------------------------

Well it looks like this is exactly what they're doing with the AppleTV...

To me it pretty much confirms that a custom .h264 YouTube player will be added to the iPhone, and possibly at launch...

Sure you can "neatly" organize your music in folders in Explorer (never-mind that iTunes can organize music into folders, playlists and smart playlists too).

But what happens when you play your neatly organized music on the Zen Stone? It plays them sequentially only in ALPHANUMERIC ORDER!!.

http://au.creative.com/GetStarted/ZENStone/faqs.asp#faq_0_9

The only way to play music in the order you want on the Zen Stone is to add numbers to the beginning of filenames! With iTunes and the iPod shuffle, you can reorder the music the way you want, either automatically by album, artist etc. or manually in any arbitrary order you want.

So having to add numbers to filenames is less clunky than using iTunes? Even if you use the Creative software, the Zen Stone will still play music only in alphanumeric order...

And if you really want to move music off the iPod shuffle into any computer, just keep a copy of YamiPod or other similar utilities on the disk part of the iPod and just run it from there, no need to install anything on the host computer.

Lastly, this player doesn't support AAC nor PlayforSure tunes!

"People just do not care about fact-checking anymore...

Bill Gates spoke out against DRM months before Jobs did."

How about you do some fact-checking yourself?

Well before Gates, Jobs said in 2002: "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own,"

http://www.macworld.com/news/2002/03/04/jobs/

Jobs also stated a while ago that piracy would always exist and that people would find ways to break DRM no matter what.

And while Bill Gates said something like "DRM is a pain for consumers", his main point was that the DRM system needed to be improved so that it would be easier to use, he never specifically said that music should be sold without DRM. Also, it wasn't a company stance, it was simply Bill speaking at a conference.

Jobs on the other hand, with the open letter, was very clear about the need to stop using DRM on music. And this letter was published on Apple's site as an official statement, linked from the front page.

If it was not for Apple releasing the iPod and having a success with it, WMA would've become the standard everywhere, and the RIAA would've probably already phased out standard un-DRMed CDs, to replace them with WMA-DRMed only CDs.

Then, people and government couldn't complain about interoperability problems, since all players sold would be able to play DRMed WMA. The Zune wouldn't even exist.

Maybe Linux and Mac users would be angry about the lack of support for WMA, but you know what happen when they complain about the lack of compatibility with their OS? They get ridiculed for having a small market-share and being irrelevant.

At best, MS would've been forced to release a Linux and Mac version of WMP, but the DRM would have remained.

"(1) Does not stream! (if you have more than 40GB of media on your server - start getting selective!) "

What? It does stream music and videos...

Actually in the video, most of the stuff seen is streamed over the internet, from Apple's servers, but it can also streams your own collection from your computer, out of the box.

When it was unveiled at Macworld they didn't even say it had an HD since the main feature shown was streaming...

"(2) Limited video format support (e.g. no DIVX, WMV etc)"

xVid and DiVX have already been hacked into the Apple TV, two days after its release, just by dropping an already available Quicktime plug-in into a folder, WMV shouldn't be so far ahead. Turns out that the ATV is really easy to hack, so much that it almost seems intentional from Apple's part.