In any case, a combined blogging-podcasting-videophone beats shouting "Get me rewrite!" into one of those old candlestick phones in your best Cary Grant (or Rosalind Russell) imitation. Even if the new laptop does cost $2,000-plus. Meanwhile, Apple's sound-editing program GarageBand has added Podcast Recording Studio features for 2006, according to Jobs' address at the MacWorld Expo. And Mac's iPhoto program will enable "photocasts" -- basically online photo albums your family or friends can subscribe to, then receive automatic notice when you've added fresh images, even download them into an iPod, like podcasts. (The Expo also heard much about Aperture, Apple's heavy-duty image manager for professional photographers.)

In another similarity to podcasting, the idea of subscription photoblogs has been explored by bloggers, developers and entrepreneurs over the past year or two, and I don't know exactly when Apple picked up the trend, although iPhoto always has had a photo-album orientation. The photocasts, like podcasts and news aggregators, use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) coding, which can be received by any computer -- not just Macintoshes. That's good for, as Apple used to say, "the rest of us."