Jobbed Steve Jobs made a giant splash at MacWorld -- big surprise. The reality distortion field is in full effect. The iPod Shuffle and the Mac mini will be two of the hottest products of the year. I think they're really beautiful products that are cool, will help Apple gain marketshare, and offer nothing interesting from a technology standpoint. There's no way I'd get a Mini, but the Shuffle is interesting enough to get a look from me. It would complement my 40GB iRiver nicely. The product I was most interested in was iWork, particularly the Pages component. I hate Microsoft Word. It's stupid and bloated and forced upon me. I don't think I've been happy with Word since 5.1 for Mac OS. I've been tooling around with free alternatives like Open Office and AbiWord. The latter is pretty good, but it still lacks some features I want. Pages looks like a great word processor. I really want to check it out. From what I've seen so far, it makes the platform more attractive and interesting. If Entourage improves greatly in its next release, the Mac platform would be a nice alternative for me.