Xserve G5. This fills a big hole in the Apple line-up. Sales stalled for the Xserve after the G5 Desktop was announced. Apple needs to reenter the enterprise market by leveraging Unix and 64 bit computing. The Xserve is still a small part of Apple sales, but had been growing quite fast. The Virginia Tech Super computer is great press for Apple and Jobs acknowledged that rack mount machines would have made it easier. The back door to the enterprise market might be through increasing sales and credibility in higher education, the scientific community and government. The G5 server is a critical component. Word is that these machines were delayed because Apple needed the newest 90nm IBM technology to reduce heat in order to keep the 1u form factor.

Garage Band. Very cool application. Many 13 year olds will be locking themselves in their rooms. The iApps are brilliant sales tools for Apple hardware. Great companion product to iTunes.

Office 2004. With development of Explorer stopped, it is important to see a new version of Office confirmed for the Mac.

iPod Mini. I am embarrassed to say that I do not have a definitive answer about the drive technology, but I suspect it's a single 1" Toshiba and not a pair or Cornice 2GB storage units. The important issue is the new form factor and not price. New drive technology carries a high initial price, but is likely to drop as production volume increases. Small physical size is important and the new iPod is a place-marker until the prices drop and capacities increase. With demand so high for iPods in general, this is not going to be a flop by any stretch of the imagination. It's all about storage right now and storage is driving the cost of portable players. Jobs set 256MB as the bare minimum for a useful flash player. It remains to be seen if flash memory will become cheap enough to warrant a flash based iPod. I suspect that Apple would want to have between 512MB and 1GB on board before fielding a flash based player.