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Following up on my gushing article about the new iMacs and iPods from yesterday, I sat down to do the math on price/features between Dell and Apple. I once again revisited the “High End Consumer Desktop” specs and pricing to see what impact Apple’s new line has on that shootout. You can read the details, but very briefly, the gap has widened dramatically in Apple’s favor, both in price and in features.

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Apple’s latest surprise announcements were so over-the-top that I wanted to write a few paragraphs about them. Once again, a highly anticipated product (this month, a video-capable iPod; last month, an iTunes-capable cell phone) is upstaged by a product no one anticipated. Last month, the iPod nano took everyone by surprise in its sheer audacity and beauty. This month, the new “media center” iMac is an even bigger surprise, and in some ways even more audacious.

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I’m diverging a bit from the usual topics to share my discovery of a small software miracle that will truly elicit “Oohs” and “Aahs!” from readers who spend time digitizing their old vinyl records. In the best shareware tradition, a mathematics professor in Australia named Brian Davies has applied his mathematical prowess and his knowledge of digital audio to produce a java application that succeeds in a spectacular way where many commercial packages have failed: With his ClickRepair application, music lovers everywhere can now clean up audio files transferred from old vinyl records without compromising the sound quality of the underlying music. And he makes this possible for an investment of only $25.

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