Ok, so all the anticipation… and for what? Let’s leave aside the new intel Mac mini, how many songs Apple have sold through iTunes, and all that good stuff. Let’s talk iPod for a second here.

For many reasons, I’m sure all of them sound business, Apple played this one *ultra* safe. A $350 speaker system? Convince me. At the moment I’ve got my iPod hooked up through some JBL Creature Speakers and a dock. Total cost? Less than a hundred bucks. Now why am I going to spend 3x that for an Apple branded speaker system? Hi fidelity? Come on. I’m listening to 128kbps audio here.

What would have been a real show stopper would have been if they incorporated AirTunes into this thing. Don’t make me go buy a $350 speaker system and then an ADDITIONAL $130 to get it to integrate with my existing system.

Hello, $350 + $130 = $480! For that much money we almost start talking about a Mac mini (Front Row, iLife, heck bluetooth and Airport Extreme!)

So give me the boombox. Sell me the speakers. But put AirTunes in this thing, so that when I switch it on, I can immediately start streaming music to it, regardless of where my iPod is. Let me buy several of them and put them in each room of the house. Speaker system + Airport Express all bundled into one nice unit, one plug. Let me load one with batteries and put it in the yard. Don’t ask me to spend $350 for a speaker box, then more for wireless, and still have to deal with cables!

While we’re there, put a screen on it, so I can watch videos on it. Give me some outputs so I can put it in the living room to replace my dvd player and connect it to my brand new 32″ HDTV. If it’s cheap enough, whack an IDE hard drive in there (80, 120, 160GB would do?) and let me migrate my entire iTunes media collection to it via the standard iPod Firewire dock connector. Sure that might take some time to transfer the first time, but at last I can free up my iMac for stuff like making iMovies and recording podcasts instead of hosting music for my house.

Get the music out of the computer, where it only went to hide to bide it’s time for technology to catch up. Why am I using a 2GHz state-of-the-art chip from Intel to stream mp3 files? I could do that with an old school G3.

Give me the real iPod Boombox. Give me liberty, or give me death.