A Bluetooth iPod (and three other Apple distractions). Another processor landmark from Intel has taken its Pentium4 line past 3GHz chip, with a 3.6Ghz part following hard on its heels. It makes more dismal reading for professional Apple users, who've seen the most competitive Apple hardware spanked out of sight by Chipzilla's latest in tests by Digital Video Editing.

This couldn't come at a worse time: for a hardware company, the whole point of improving your system software is to sell more hardware. (Unless you license the software, which obviously doesn't apply to Apple).

And it could be some time before the seventh cavalry arrives, in the form of the PowerPC 970 processor. So what can Apple do? [The Register]

A long lead-in recounting Apple's woes wrt. CPU speed (quoted above), but the meat of the story is the suggestions for Apple products to distract everyone from that issue. The last suggestion for an iPod with Bluetooth and Rendezvous-based sharing is arguably the hottest.

However, I have to say that I'd be most excited by the iPliance, though I'd call it iServe. I'm already considering repurposing an old iBook as a file server. We only have laptops around the house. I'd like to have something that is always running for hosting various services: print, file sharing, web, etc., and I'd prefer that it be unobtrusive in size, sound, and energy consumption. A headless iBook (or iMac) would be ideal.

The "XTablet" is also interesting. I was reading a PDF file on my TiBook the other day. I had it rotated on the TiBook's screen, and I have to say that it is the most usable view I've ever had of an electronic document. If you could spin the TiBook screen around to face out and cover the keyboard, you would have one hot tablet PC.
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