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(Wrote most of this this morning, neglected to post it 'til now.)

Steve Jobs's MacWorld New York keynote was pretty impressive this year.

One of the coolest things is a new technology called Rendezvous, developed at Apple. It automatically detects any device connected to the local IP network that your computer is on.

That would mostly be of interest only to geeks, except that Apple software will know what to do with those devices once it finds them. For example, you hook up a printer to your network, and OS X will automatically notice the printer and configure it for you and let you print to it, without your having to set anything up.

But even cooler was the iTunes-with-Rendezvous demo. (This will apparently be available to the public next year sometime.) Steve sits on one side of the stage with a computer connected to an AirPort network; Phil Schiller stands on the other side of the stage with a sleeping PowerBook. Steve launches iTunes on his computer. Phil opens up his PowerBook, thereby waking it up and automatically connecting it to the AirPort network. His iTunes playlist immediately appears in Steve's iTunes. Jed starts thinking: hoo boy, the RIAA is not gonna like this; major piracy-enabling technology. Steve plays a song from that playlist. And then Phil closes his PowerBook, taking it off the network, and the song stops playing, and Phil's playlist goes away. And Steve explicitly points out what I hadn't quite realized: the music is not being copied over the network; it's being served from the computer it's on.

Which means that you can listen to other people's music without copying it, as long as they're on the same network. Everyone's a server. It's like Napster, only without copying any music—you're listening to the copy on your friend's machine.

Of course, there are still intprop issues to consider here. Presumably everyone on the network can listen to a given song at once, without being in the same room; how close is that to a radio model? Radio stations pay the music licensing companies to broadcast music; presumably the RIAA will not be happy with every Mac becoming essentially an Internet radio station, and no licensing fees being paid.

And of course, it's still easy to actually copy the MP3 files over the network if you're so inclined.

But still, it seems like an elegant and interesting approach to the problem of balancing letting people share music against not actually spreading copies of the music around.

(I'm less thrilled with the notion of everyone putting all their songs on a central server and listening to them from there; that more centralized approach feels a little more to me like mass copying. (Lots of companies' employees are running music servers; it's not clear to me whether those are usually of the copy-to-your-disk variety or of the serve-from-remote-disk-without-copying variety, but at least one company with a music server lost a copyright-infringement lawsuit and had to pay beaucoups bucks.) But I'm not awake enough to explore that distinction further right now, or to tell whether it's a distinction without a difference.)

Buncha other cool stuff from that keynote, too: new 20GB iPod, new slightly thinner 10GB iPod, price drops on the 5GB and 10GB iPods, new version of iTunes that looks like it does something pretty close to what I've been hoping for (lets you rate music and generate playlists on the fly based on ratings); preview demos of MacOS X 10.2, due out in about five weeks, which will fix most of my remaining problems with OS X, and which I think I'll be able to recommend to anyone who hasn't upgraded yet; new iMac with 17" widescreen display; etc. Also announcement that iTools is changing its name (to the goofy ".mac," to jump on the Microsoft ".NET" bandwagon) and starting to charge for using it ($100/year, which sounds like a lot; they should've called it $8/month, which sounds like a lot less). I never thought much of the iTools services, but apparently a huge number of people have been using them, and are now upset that it's switching to a for-pay model; they'd been led to believe that a mac.com email address was permanently free. I predict the same fate for .mac that befell eWorld (was that what it was called?), Apple's first attempt at for-pay online community, which has been called "the first electronic ghost town." But we'll see.

That new 10GB iPod is awfully tempting. (And the new iPod software gives you access to both address book and calendar on your iPod; add a to-do list and the iPod starts looking a lot like a PDA. It won't be replacing my Palm anytime soon, but it'll be interesting to see how close the iPod comes to sneaking up on being a full-fledged PDA before anyone notices.) There are now four Cool Devices I want to buy in the near future: the new iPod, a car stereo (to replace the one that's been sitting dead in my car for many months now), a digital camera, and a wireless hub/firewall. Some of those are less expensive than others, but I'd really better finish paying off the TiBook before getting more toys.

Enough. Sleep.