MacRumors notes a new id string for the next MacBook Pro has started to leak out of Cupertino. It’s been many months (June 2007) since the MBPs were updated, so this signals what many anticipated happening soon anyway.

Questions: will it have a fancy new touchpad ala MacBook Air? Will it have greater screen resolution than current models?

Will the Leopard 10.5.2 update be 400MB? Will it include a user-selectable transparency level for the menu bar? Will it fix Keef’s Firewire problems?

Tune in to find out!

Netflix lets one fly at Apple on the eve of MacWorld, in an attempt to blunt Apple’s reputed upcoming debut of $3.99 streaming/downloadable movie rentals.

For instance, under a popular plan that charges $16.99 per month to rent up to three DVDs at a time, Netflix customers could watch as many as 17 hours of entertainment each month on the streaming service, dubbed “Watch Instantly.”
With Monday’s change, virtually all Netflix subscribers will be able to stream as many movies and TV shows as they want from a library containing more than 6,000 titles. There will be no additional charge for the unlimited access.
Only the small portion of Netflix customers who pay $4.99 to rent up to two DVDs per month won’t be provided unlimited access to the streaming service.

source

I haven’t found much info on Netflix.com about the service — it’s a deluge of Sign Up Now! pages — or even if it works with Macs yet, but either way you need a high speed connection

Wired has a fantastic story running about how the iPhone came to be amid the intrigues of Steve Jobs’ inner court.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”
The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting.

[by Silvarios] [taken from Dear lord: iCab 4.0.0 beta!]

Warning, it’s going to take a fair bit of words to get my point across. Here’s the modern web attention span version. iCab 4.0.0 beta has been released to registered iCab users. It is a universal binary and requires Mac OS 10.3.9, while some features require 10.4 or 10.5. Version 4.0 of iCab is a complete rewrite in Cocoa as compared to version 3.0 which was built with Carbon. Version 4.0 uses WebKit and the older versions use the proprietary iCab rendering engine. Here’s a screenshot from the iCab 4.0.0 beta:

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