Head to a real or virtual Apple store near you to check out the new iPods. And by new, I mean like way new; this isn’t just a bump in capacity, this is 2 entirely new ranges, and revisions to everything that wasn’t new. As with the iPod Mini, replaced when it was still Apple’s highest selling product, Apple shows that one way to success is to just keep pushing out the greatness when it’s ready, not when your graphs show that your cash cow is waning.

Anyway, you can see the details for yourself, I just wanted to point out a minor detail. The iPod Classic (I feel like Classic should be written in curly script for some reason) now goes up to 160GB. I won’t bore you with tales of my first hard drive (20MB, if you’re asking), but dude, 160GB is just an assload of storage by anyone’s measure.

Josh has tried Numbers, the new spreadsheet app from Apple, and finds it pretty but unusable for anything vaguely serious. This mirrors my experience with Pages, their word processing/DTP app. It’s lovely, the controls are almost always exactly where you expect and work how you expect, and it’s just a joy to use. Until you get past about four pages, when it bogs down so horribly that a third of my time is spent watching a beach ball spin. For reference I’m working on a 16 page document with a couple of embedded graphics, using a MacBook Core Duo 1.83GHz and 2G of RAM, and haven’t experienced such lag since using my 286 in 1990.

If you have an iPod, and are worried about getting it stolen, this could be the ultimate in protection.

I took the MacBook in today to get a new power supply (the old one wasn’t working properly because the pins that make the power connection wouldn’t tract (that’s the opposite of retract, right?) to make a connection). While in there the nice Apple man also changed the interior trim because of Orange MacBook Syndrome – though many found theirs changing colour within weeks, it’s taking about 9 months for mine, which shows what a light touch I have. Anyway, for obvious reasons they couldn’t replace the US keyboard with another US one, so I’m now using a UK one. Please let me know if you can no longer understand what I’m saying.

(Actually the key layout is physically different, unfortunately making the shift key I favour smaller, and moving the return key, which are two of the worst changes they could have made. Ah well.)

My MacBook just crashed, as in turned itself off without any warning. This has never happened to me before, and I’m a little freaked. The fact that there’s a green light flashing on the battery is a source of concern too.