So yesterday was fun as Apple rolled out a series of new products. I was really surprised that unlike previous events, the product was not available in the Apple store the day of announcement. They used to always have product available at the stores when announced, that just doesn’t taste right. The day the iMac 2007 was announced, there were several setup in the store when I got there after work. It sounds to me like some last minute software/hardware/delivery issues spoiled some of the thunder.

And speaking of thunder, how about that $200 iPhone price drop? The last remaining 4GB models at the local Apple store were flying off the shelves as people picked up a second unit for a spouse, kid, friend, whatever. A great deal on a great product, congratulations to those who got them. Even $399 is a sweet deal and will likely expand the installed base of people using the iPhone. If you think about it, remember the Motorola RAZR when it first came out? $399, no discounts on Cingular. Within a few months it was down to $199 and now you get them for $69. Price reductions are a fact of life – rather than whine about the $200 “fan-boy” tax, just enjoy the phone. Not that I wouldn’t mind an iTunes store credit or something as a thank you for helping launch/beta-test their product!

As for the new products, unless you live in a hole, you’ve seen them already. The iPod Classic is the old classic iPod with a bigger drive (are we still using moving parts in portable devices?), the iPod Nano got short and fat and video support, the shuffle got some new colors, and the big news was of course the iPod Touch. An iPhone without the phone and e-mail support. It also doesn’t have Google Maps, Weather, Stocks, or a Camera. But it does have WiFi.

Both the Touch and the iPhone are getting the iTunes Mobile Music Store. Now you can drunk-buy songs while out and about. Very cool. No word on whether or not you can download them over EDGE yet or only WiFi, I guess we’ll see. Take that Verizon/Sprint with your phone-only $2 a song crap ass stupid music store of suckage. And as for the Zune, well, at least you’ve got “The Social.”

Oh, and since none of the product was actually in the store last night, I spent a couple of hours with the very helpful Tulsa Apple store staff and the MacBook Pro. The applications are so familiar, so friendly and so easy to use it just makes it harder and harder to wait for Leopard. My only concern at this point is waiting for a just-out-of-the-oven version of OS X compared to a known, updated version that has seen a lot of user testing. I don’t want to have the “Vista” experience all over again with a fresh operating system, but I also don’t want to pay a $129 buy-it-now tax to upgrade to Leopard when it’s all said and done.