As predicted in February, US iPhone subscribers are now getting free Wi-Fi Access at AT&T hotspots around the country including Barnes and Noble and Starbucks.  This correlates to the plans offered in the UK by O2 and Tmobile in Germany. 

Apparantly it isn't terribly hard to spoof the iPhone interface and get your laptop on free WiFi either - as a Macrumors forum poster shows us.  No announcement from AT&T or Apple has been made but expect one shortly.

Apple today upgraded its iMac selection to include faster (and more efficient) Penryn (or Montevina QX9770!?) processors - topping out at over 3 GHz.  The iMacs can be configured with much burlier graphics cards (NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS) as well.  Unsurprisingly, Apple didn't include Blu Ray as an option...perhaps next time?

“The iMac’s gorgeous aluminum and glass all-in-one design has been an incredible hit with our customers and is just one of the reasons Mac sales are growing three and a half times faster than PC sales,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With the latest Intel processors, a faster new graphics option and more memory, customers now have even more reasons to love the iMac.”

Also Apple touts the new iMac's green credentials:

OK, we all know how to hack into an iPod and download its contents off of it - you know in case you lose your computer or something?  It also isn't to hard to just copy tracks off of your computer to give to your friends - just legal stuff obviously.  But what if you just want to mainline that music from on iPod to another?  miShare has your back with their new little gizmo.  Now how about video sharing?

 It's a little-known fact that Apple maintains a library of software updates for older (pre-January '98) Macs, Newton and Apple II machines.

The company hosts a huge library of downloads for these veteran machines, naturally warning that "all the software here is considered obsolete and may do harm if improperly installed. Please use extreme caution." 

All Apple software released since January 1998 remains available, but that's found within the AppleCare Knowledge Base.

Windows users who have Apple's Software Update installed are getting notices that there is a new version of Safari available for upgrade - even if they never installed Safari in the first place.  Safari 3.1 for Windows is Apple's first Safari version not to carry the Beta moniker.

There are definitely two schools of thought on this one - we are NOT taking sides. 

The first is that Apple is using its market leading position in music jukebox software to push its browser - like Microsoft used its market leading position in operating systems to push IE a few years back.  While effective, it isn't really fair to the Firefoxes and Operas of the world who don't have that leverage to fall back on.  It is also a bit misleading to say it is a "software update" when it was never installed in the first place.  If you were using Microsoft Office on Mac and an update came up saying "Update your Internet Explorer (which you don't have on your machine) for Mac to 5.2.3".  Would you be happy?

Apple has now filled what was a gaping hole in their Time Machine backup ecosystem.  You can now use Airport connected HFS+ Formatted USB hard drives to backup your Leopard computers.  Apple had promised this feature long ago and then pulled the advertising for the "Airport Disk Time Machine Backups" and hasn't able to deliver during the first two releases of Leopard.  This might have been more difficult than originally planned (though our Flux Capacitor has helped many). 

Apple has now released Airport and Time Machine updates that now allow you to see Airport connected USB drives and back up to them like Time Capsule drives.

We don't condone torrenting stuff or bypassing Apple's $99-$199 charge for developing iPhone applications but thought it would be prudent to report that the iPhone SDK is now floating around the torrent sites.  The DMG file weighs in at 2.1 GB and is the real deal we can confirm.

If you actually are successful in developing an application with this, you will be forced to pay Apple the normal price before they publish the application on their site, one must assume.

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Coming from here - I was surprised to see i am Legend's alternative ending.  takea gander...

Perhaps we'll see alternative ending choices in our movie viewing options in the future - maybe even in AppleTV?

Amazon discounted the MacBook Air to $1744 (after $50 rebate) today.  The MacBook Air has been in Amazon's Best selling electronics page since its release (it currently is at #17) so the markdown is obviously not because of slow sales.  It is the lowest price we could find anywhere.

Amazon is also offering large discounts on the last generation Apple MacBooks ($919 after $75 rebate) and Macbook Pros ($1544 after $150 rebate).  Since the latest changes were fairly minimal (in fact the older model Prros have MORE L2 Cache 4Mb vs 3Mb), it might be a good time to pick up a very slightly outdated machine at a very significant discount.  Rebates end March 11.

In other Amazon news, Time Capsule in both $299 500Gb  and 1Tb $499 models is now shipping.