Back in January during his MacWorld Keynote Address, Steve Jobs hinted that Apple was going to be really busy launching new products and innovations this year. True to his word, there's a lot coming out of Cupertino these days.

Here's a rundown of announcements and rumours for February:

• New iPod Touch and iPhones were released earlier this month with twice as much memory as previous models
• New MacBooks and MacBook Pros just shipped, with another refresh due in June
• O2 annouced the iPhone launch for Ireland, with Austria rumored to be close behind
• A media event scheduled for March 6 will discuss "Enterprise" and launch the official SDK for the iPhone (and iPod touch).
• More rumours are circulating about a 3G iPhone coming sometime mid-year

Since the beginning of the year, Apple's stock has dropped by 40%, from a high of $198 per share at the end of December '07 to a low of $119 earlier this week. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that now would be a good time to order a slice of AAPL pie "a la mode". :)

In other podcast-related news... Those consumer-centric media geniuses at Apple have come up with a new way to make the podcast format even more powerful and consumable. The following patent application surfaced this week at the USPTO:

CREATION, MANAGEMENT AND DELIVERY OF PERSONALIZED MEDIA ITEMS

Abstract

Improved techniques to facilitate generation, management and delivery of
personalized media items for users are disclosed. Users are able to
influence or control content within a media item being personalized. In
one embodiment, personalized media items are podcasts. Users are able to
influence or control the content in or with a podcast. In other words, a
podcast can be created in accordance with a user's needs or
specifications so that the content within a podcast is customized or
personalized for the user.

So what does that mean? In broad-strokes, it's a framework that will allow you to program your own podcast "mixes", by taking segments of your favourite podcast sources, and combining them together in the order you want. Like traditional podcasts, it will allow you to subscribe to your new mix so every day you could get your custom-blended mix of news, commentary, music, etc.. If you currently subscribe to 15 different podcasts, and you only want to hear specific segments from each one, combined in a single show, this will allow you to do just that. Obviously it's going to be designed to work perfectly with Apple's iTunes application and sync to the iPod and AppleTV devices.

The images below, from Apple's patent application, demonstrate how it might work:

Here's another way to look at it: you're hungry for pizza but you don't want to order a "Pepperoni" or "Vegetarian" pizza. You want it customised with your favourite toppings. Just the way YOU like it. In other words, Apple's idea is kinda like ordering a custom podcast pizza.

After thinking about it some more, I have some real issues with the new iTunes Movie Rentals business model. The mechanics are solid, and the idea of delivering movies through iTunes is a good one, but as with so many things, the devil is in the details:

The Bad (aka "the catch"): you only have 24 hours to watch it once you hit the "play" button. THIS is the problem.

Now I'm the first one to admit I drink Apple coolaid, but this 24-hr business is a poke in the eye with a very sharp, hot stick. I'm guessing it wasn't Apple's idea to limit rentals to 24 hours. It was probably a concession made to get all the major movie studios to sign on. Let's not forget that these are major studios that already have very cozy relationships with brick-and-mortar rental outfits like Blockbuster. So I don't know whether to be mad at Apple for going ahead with this, or be mad at the studios for being such pricks. The reason why I'm so disappointed is because I often take more than 24 hours to get through a movie (you should see how long it takes me to get through a book).

Consider this *very* typical scenario from the real world of video/DVD-rentals: it's Friday night, I'm in the local video rental store with my wife, and we're looking for something to watch that night. We can't agree on which film we want to see so we grab 2 or 3. I choose a movie I really want to watch and my wife chooses one she really wants to watch, and let's say we rent a 3rd that we're both really interested in seeing. We often do this because we know that we can start watching one movie and if we don't feel up for it we can switch to another one and finish watching the 1st one another night. The key here is "another night". Not the next morning/afternoon within a 24hr period. When we rent DVD's we have up to 7 days to return them. That's 168 hours! And guess what, sometimes that's how long it takes to finish what we started.

I understand that there has to be a time limit in the above scenario because we're renting a physical product and other people may want to rent it and they can't until we return it. But with downloads, there is no physical limitation to the number of copies that Apple can "rent". So why limit the rental by time? Why not limit it by number of plays? Can someone responsible for this absurdity please come forward to answer this question? Because frankly, the current solution does not make any logical sense whatsoever. And when everyone else realises this, there will be an uproar and consumers will not embrace it, they'll ignore it. And that would be bad for both Apple and the studios.

Update:  The plot thickens, or gets more complicated anyway. The folks over at Engadget have put together a great chart that reveals that movie rentals are not quite as straightforward (or transferable) as Steve Jobs had everyone believe during his keynote address. The game changes whether you rent/download via iTunes or AppleTV. Oh, and it doesn't work with previous-gen iPods, and none of this applies to Windows PC users. They get nada. Hrm...

In case you've been in a coma for the past 24 hours, yesterday was the 2008 MacWorld Keynote Address by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. This is the big event when Apple unveils some of its new products to kick off the year, and the presentation for 2008 was a doozy. Here's a summary of the big announcements:

• Time Capsule: an Airport Extreme WiFi router + built-in 500GB or 1TB HD that syncs with Leopard's Time Machine for automatic wireless backups.
  
• iPhone: a bunch of new features including geo-locating Maps application, SMS to multiple contacts, WebClips (bookmark icons) and multiple customisable home screens.
• iPod Touch: new apps for the Touch include Mail, Maps, Weather, Stocks and Notes, in addition to WebClips and customisable home screens.
• iTunes Movie Rentals: rent DVD-quality movies for $2.99-$3.99 or HD movies for $1 more. Watch them on your Mac, iPod, iPhone or Widescreen TV using a revamped Apple TV that is no longer tied to a computer. Only in the US right away, and internationally by end of year.
• MacBook Air: "The world's thinnest notebook". Specs include: 3lbs, 13.3" widescreen, LED backlight display, built-in iSight, full-size backlit keyboard, multi-touch trackpad, 1.6 or 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, 80GB standard (iPod 1.8" HD) or 64GB SSD, and a battery life of 5hrs. There's no optical drive, but instead it has a new application called Remote Disk that allows the MacBook Air use another computer's optical drive over WiFi. All this and it's the most environmentally-friendly laptop ever built. I reeeally want one of these.

It's really hard not to be impressed. Seriously, this is hands-down the most slick and cleverly integrated family of hardware and software products on the market today. Nobody else is even close to touching Apple's offering of innovative computing solutions. Who cares about the enterprise market?!? From the home, to the studio, to the road, Apple has it figured out. I have a feeling they're going to make a LOT of money this year.

I have to confess, I am profoundly excited about something being sold by a company called Apple. This is deeply worrisome on many levels, but alas, I am powerless to stop the chain of events that are unfolding at this time in history. Therefore, I feel that I ought to at least ride the wave for what it's worth, since I can always hop off, or back on, later*. It's called the "touch".