Wow, every once in a while one of these things flies in right under the radar, huh? Were we the only ones who made a Feissian noise of inarticulate confusion upon seeing Apple's home page trumpeting the release of AirPort Express? Because when faithful viewer Adam Lang mentioned it, we figured he was just toying with us in a cruel Pavlovian fashion-- mention surprise new Apple gear, witness uncontrollable drooling, hand us a mop, lather, rinse, repeat. But no; it's a Real Thingy™, and the copious saliva expenditure was justified... because this puppy looks really freakin' cool.

Well, maybe not "looks" in a strictly aesthetic sense, mind you; after all, it looks pretty much like a current PowerBook AC adapter with no cord and a few ports drilled into its side-- attractive, sure, but not "cool" as in "original Base Station silver UFO from a '50s sci-fi flick with aliens with British accents and names like 'Gork' and 'Zyron'" cool.

No, we meant "looks" as in "is perceived as," because this thing is practically a full-fledged AirPort Extreme Base Station packed into a white plastic box roughly the size of two 40 GB iPods glued together, and the weight of just one of them plus one Oreo. (Yes, we weighed an Oreo. Well, technically it was a Hint o' Mint Newman-O, but we're assuming the weight difference is negligible.) You plug it directly into a wall outlet (or use the optional power extension cord, apparently sold separately), plug in an Ethernet cable running to the local network, and bam-- your AirPort-equipped Macs can all reach the network wirelessly.

Why is this cool, you ask? Well, because with more and more hotels offering broadband Internet these days, you can tote along an AirPort Express and use it without having a big ugly cable hanging out of your PowerBook tethering you to the wall. Better still, you and your laptop-lugging traveling companion can both share the broadband simultaneously without fighting over who gets to use the cord-- a conflict which invariably ends in either the emergency room or the local police lock-up. Uh, so we're told. [Cough]

Oh, but it gets better. There's also a USB port so you can wirelessly share a compatible printer, and-- this is the biggie-- an audio jack. Yes, AirPort Express boasts a nifty feature called "AirTunes," which essentially links iTunes directly to an AirPort Express unit so you can play your music through a connected stereo or set of powered speakers. No need to plug them into your PowerBook; plug them into AirPort Express instead and leave your laptop unfettered and ready to boogie. (The single audio jack supports both analog and optical digital connections.)

As always, there are a few catches, but none of them is a real smackdown. The first is that AirTunes only works with iTunes 4.6, which won't be available until "later this week." But that's not much of a problem considering the second catch, which is that, according to Apple's press release, AirPort Express itself won't be available until the middle of next month. The third isn't so much a catch as it is a simple fact of life: Stuff Costs Money. AirPort Express carries a sticker price of $129, which is actually pretty darn good considering everything it does; however, Apple's suggestion that you "connect one to every stereo or set of powered speakers in your house" strikes us as the blithe suggestion of a guy who cleared almost $75 million last year.

All told, though, AirPort Express sounds like a winner-- and we're sorely tempted to get one for the living room even though our TiVo already streams wirelessly from iTunes playlists, because TiVo still can't play iTunes Music Store songs, and it'd be nice to stream directly from Party Shuffle, etc. As always, our deepest gratitude to Apple for providing yet another excuse for us to sink deeper into debt. Woo-hoo!

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the music front, we've got some good news for the Brits out there (for a change): smile, you may soon be as broke as we all are! Faithful viewer Boesterama forwarded us a BBC News article which reports that "Apple has called a press conference for 15 June, saying 'the biggest story in music is about to get even bigger.'" Gee, and this special event is scheduled to happen at Old Billingsgate Market in London. Let's see, now... Apple... Music... London... What on earth do you suppose that could that be all about?

So, yeah, evidently those rumors of Euro iTMS touching down in mid-June were right after all. MacRumors has kindly posted a scan of the actual press invitation, and if memory serves, it looks an awful lot like the press invites that went out last October, which also featured a nice mosaic of iPod silhouette rumpshakers and a promise that sounds oddly familiar: "The year's biggest music story is about to get even bigger." Considering that that event expanded the iTMS to Windows users, Apple isn't exactly being subtle about the agenda at this London gig, here.

Incidentally, it isn't just the Brits who should be celebrating; remember that Apple was attempting to secure Europe-wide licensing terms from the record labels, so if the iTMS really does launch in the UK Tuesday week, provided Apple didn't cave on its all-Europe plans, localized iTMSes ought to be popping up all over the continent within weeks, days, or seconds. Indeed, a Reuters article pointed out by faithful viewer Ian Evans simply reports that Apple's announcement will be the launch of the "European version of the iTunes online music store," which certainly implies that Apple isn't just starting with the UK first and working its way eastward.

Then again, the same Reuters article also claims that "traditionally when Apple announces a new product or service, it is available straight away." (Try to keep a straight face. Go on, just try. It's fun!) Nevertheless, iTunes events typically do feature immediate availability of any new services, and we won't be at all surprised if Apple's launch includes available-now localized online stores for the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and maybe a few other countries comprising a wide majority of the European market. After all, it has to do something to avoid making this look like nothing more than a "Me Too" gesture; remember, Napster launched in the UK (and only the UK) last month.

Finally, we get to see what happens when the iTMS moves into a market in which it wasn't first out of the gate; we're really sick of hearing that the only reason Apple leads in U.S. legal song downloads is because it had a head start. The Beeb asserts that Apple will encounter "far stiffer competition in Europe than it does in the U.S.," because in addition to Napster UK, Europe also has OD2, which has been running for years and is "currently the UK's most popular online music store." Sony Connect is also set to launch later this month. But frankly, that doesn't sound like all that much competition to us; in the U.S. Apple holds its own against Napster, BuyMusic.com (oops, we mean Buy.com), Sony Connect (we assume), Wal-Mart, and more. So we can hardly wait to see the numbers.

Whatever. A final word of warning to our European friends: you will spend more than you think you will. Our advice is not to fight it; just go with the flow, download all those little gems you find sparkling through Apple's catalog, and turn to a life of crime or something to pay for it. It's all good.

Geez, after something of a famine last week, between AirPort Express today and a "mysterious" (hee hee hee) music-related announcement slated for a special press event in London in a week or so, we're all feeling nice and full, right? Well, don't put down that fork just yet, because there's always room for JELL-O: rumor has it that Apple's going to serve us up a big, jiggling mound of gelatinous goodness in the form of yet another new product intro. Tomorrow.

Get this: remember that interim G5 speed-bump to 2.5ish GHz we had all been waiting for since, oh, roughly New Year's or so? Of course you do; we were yammering on about it practically twice a day for months. Well, when it finally became apparent that Apple wouldn't get sufficient quantities of 90-nanometer G5s from IBM to ship the product revision before May, everyone very sensibly assumed that Apple would just skip the interim speed and make the leap right to Steve's promised 3.0 GHz Holy Land come WWDC. For ages now, it's been conventional wisdom among the rumor fiends that anyone expecting a new series of Power Mac models before June 28th is suffering the ill effects of some bad cheese.

But look, up in the sky-- it's a bird! It's a plane! It's... a last-minute prediction of vaguely disappointing interim G5 models! That's right, folks; Think Secret (who usually has a very solid track record on this sort of thing) reports that "Apple will announce speed bumps to its Power Mac G5 towers as fast as 2.6 GHz," and this earthshattering announcement will come "tomorrow, on Tuesday, June 8." Further details are annoyingly absent, bar the claim that existing G5 prices will drop in order to let Apple clear inventory alongside shipping new models; reportedly 1.6 GHz systems will drop to $1,599, dual 1.8 GHz models will slide to $2,199, and the right-now-top-of-the-line-but-tomorrow-not-so-much dual 2.0 GHz units will come in at a very attractive $2,499.

Can it possibly be true? If Apple ships these speed-bumped models tomorrow, what does that mean for the WWDC Stevenote? Well, assuming that the rumor is the real deal, we see two possibilities. The first is that Steve will indeed introduce a fourth high-end model with dual 3.0 GHz processors, with immediate preordering and delivery expected in late September; that would allow him to keep his promise of 3.0 GHz "within twelve months." The other is that 3.0 GHz by this summer turned out to be a pipe dream, this speed bump is it for a while, and Steve will conveniently neglect to mention the G5 at all, pretending that no such promise was ever made. Fingers crossed for the former-- again, provided this whole "speed bumps tomorrow" scenario isn't just some feverish opium dream that wound up online.

That's a big assumption, too-- especially since Think Secret includes the typical caveat about how "dates for speed bumps can be subject to change," so don't be too surprised if tomorrow brings us exactly zilch. And frankly, zilch wouldn't be half bad, seeing as 2.6 GHz is going to feel a little flat after a year's worth of waiting for 3.0 GHz instead. At least no speed bump would totally keep the dream alive for WWDC. Check your watches; if it's after, say, 2 PM EDT on Tuesday, and the Apple Store hasn't been updated, we're probably in the clear. If the speed bumps do show up, don't mind us-- we'll just be over here huddled fetal in the corner, muttering "3.0 GHz... Steve said 3.0 GHz..." like some kind of mantra.