The missing piece appears?

To recap, the rumors of low-cost mini-iPods don't make any sense unless Apple can find some radically lower-cost manufacturer of tiny hard drives with capacities of a few gigabytes.

Today, a company called Cornice announced a 2GB mini-drive (excuse me, "Storage Element") for a per-unit cost of $70 in gigantic quantities. I don't know if you could make money selling a $100 MP3 player based on such a thing, but it would certainly make possible a device smaller and much cheaper than a current iPod in the rumored low-end capacity.

Cornice's older devices are already used in some MP3 players (and other things, such as video cameras) and have been a focus of rumorological speculation, but they were slightly smaller in capacity, and, I think, somewhat more expensive; the players based on them haven't been all that attractively priced.

The announcement comes one day before the San Francisco Macworld keynote, but this could just be a coincidence, since the press release talks about CES, which is also coming up in a few days.

Update: Apparently Cornice's earlier drive wasn't more expensive, just smaller. $100 retail still seems low.

Celestia

If pictures from space have only whetted your desire to fly around the universe unaided, know that there's a giant new release of Celestia out, with many clever new features. (My favorite is a new option to display the stars as discs scaled by magnitude like a star map, which greatly helps in getting oriented. The more photorealistic modes have the problem that a computer monitor doesn't have anything like the dynamic range of brightnesses of real objects in the sky, so you have to choose between stopping most stars down to invisibility or making it hard to pick out the familiar stars from the general chaos.)

Contrary to indications on the site, there is a preliminary Mac OS X port of version 1.3.1 graciously assembled by HankR, which you can get on the SourceForge page. Installation is as yet slightly awkward; follow the instructions in the readme file, and if the Moon and Mars look rainbow-colored, comment out all the "BumpMap" lines in ~/Library/Application Support/CelestiaResources/data/solarsys.ssc. This version fixes the longstanding Mac orbit display bug.