Two skeptical grumbles about Apple

I don't believe this. They'd surely be selling at a loss, Steve Jobs has specifically denied the possibility, and it happens to mesh perfectly with unsupported wishful thinking that people have been batting around for months. A $100 iPod would have to be a lower-capacity, flash-based gadget, and I doubt Apple would price even such a thing that low.

This is kind of harebrained. iPhoto is basically a generic alternative to the low-end consumer photo-handling programs that come with digital cameras; it's a simple repository for uploaded pictures, with some primitive editing capabilities and the ability to hook into better external editors. Its real raison d'etre on the Mac is that the Mac versions of the programs that ship with the cameras are often poorly-written afterthoughts. I like iPhoto just barely enough to use it, but that's mostly because it comes free with the OS. If I had to pay extra for it, I'd just concoct a Finder-based scheme for organizing my photo library instead (I might feel a bit differently if I were using Windows, but I probably still wouldn't pay the money). Also, it's better in concept than in execution: it's kind of unstable and becomes sluggish with large picture libraries. Its early version of the Apple iApp "brushed-metal" interface is also getting long in the tooth; I'd like to see a major update for the Mac. If it had evolved in step with the various updates to iTunes, it would be a kick-ass utility by now.