Let’s stop talking about the iPhone3G for a minute. Did you get a good look at Steve Jobs at the WWDC Keynote yesterday?

See the pic above: on the left, Steve at the keynote for iPhone 1.0 over a year ago, and on the right, at yesterday’s presentation. They say black mock turtlenecks really are slimming, but this is a bit much.

Ever since he came onstage yesterday at Moscone West, the web has been as much abuzz about Mr. Jobs and how frighteningly thin he’s become since we last saw him as much as the new iPhone itself. Google his name today and you’ll likely get news items like this at the top of the search list.

Jobs came out in 2003 to disclose his ongoing battle with a rare form of pancreatic cancer, which has since been successfully treated, or so he says. It’s hard to tell because, as we all know, Apple and Steve Jobs seem pretty good at keeping secrets.

If something’s amiss with The Steve, it’ll have tremendous impact on the future and direction of Apple, because face it—the man is Apple. More than any other company in recent history, multi-billion dollar Apple Inc. is the one whose fate is most intimately intertwined with the vision of its leader. Let’s hope that he’s just been spending too much time with his Wii Fit balance board thing.

Seriously though, let’s pray that things are all right for Steve Jobs.

Video-on-Demand from the Apple site here. Quicktime required.

UPDATE: Now available as a free 1.18gb video podcast download from the iTunes Store.

Non-Filipino readers might find this post’s title odd, but it’s just Taglish for “I’m mobile”, which for this blogger is a clumsy play on the rumored new name for Apple’s .Mac service (and for the purposes of this blog will be referred to as DotMac, to retain the sanity of my word processor’s autocorrect feature.) It’s also a play on the current and more-than-annoying marketing campaign of local telecom provider Smart Communications called “Me na Me” presently irritating us silly here in Manila for their Smart Buddy service.

Ok. So there I go ruining the whole structure of the post just so I could have my silly title. Let’s just have it out then: According to rumors, Apple seems to be set on renaming their DotMac service, that US$99 one-year thing where you get a paltry amount of online storage and a snotty email address that ends in “mac.com” (and some other stuff), to Mobile Me. Ugh.

Dunno about you, but the fact that you can get everything DotMac is offering for free elsewhere online seems to me a testament to the lengths fanboys will go to for their mothership. (Full disclosure: I used to be suckered into this thing too, and had a DotMac account for three years or so until I wised up and saved my money instead to buy more useful things like food. And beer.) But apparently it may be time to come back to the fold.

According to many archived reports, Apple trademarked the name Mobile Mac on Jan. 5, 2006, and while much was made of it at the time as Apple folk are wont to do, nothing happened and people forgot about it. Now though, people poking through the code of the recently released 10.5.3 update of Leopard have come across considerable evidence that Apple is finally going to use the two-year-old name, presumably after the relaunching announcement to be made at Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote on June 9.

A rose by any other name, blah blah. What’s more important is what new stuff it will offer for the hundred bucks (or however much they’ll be charging for it), and right now all we can do is make educated guesses. Obviously it will tie in with the new 3G iPhone and include stuff like push email, wireless syncing and things Blackberry fans have been enjoying for years. We’ll just have to add Mobile Me to our list of things to wait for during the keynote. If it had really useful features, I wouldn’t be averse to signing back up again and resurrecting my old DotMac address.

Which also means most of us renegade iPhone users will have to formally sign up with Globe Telecom when it finally releases the phone for my country (sometime in September, if rumors are to be believed). Obviously my non-3G first-gen kracked-and-jailbroken iPhone won’t do, so I’ll have to pony up for the new one. Life is hard. Ah, well.

(By the way, is it just me, or does Mobile Me really sound like an embarrasingly jejune name for an Apple service? It even sounds …Microsoftian, like something Gates and Ballmer might’ve thought up. Sheesh.)

[Box art mock-up via TUAW]

As more builds for the 10.5.3 update for Mac OS X are seeded to developers (the latest is Build 9D34, released today) for final testing, the closer this thing comes to pop up via Software Update. And it seems to be a big one, with over 200 fixes (and some performance tweaks to the kernel - always appreciated) and likely to weigh in between 300mb to half a gig.

About time. Can’t let Psystar be the one to fix Leopard.

The last big update (10.5.2) was released in February. According to developers, this new one will focus on Time Machine and Back To My Mac, and on a great number of built-in features like Spaces, Installer, Mail and a lot of others. Granted, most of them have already been distributed piecemeal via smaller updates on many successive Tuesdays since Feb, but the whole shebang, along with the newest stuff, is coming out in Leopard 10.5.3.

I daresay it might pop-out before or just after Steve’s WWDC keynote early June, and it might have some goodies in it that would tie-in with whatever new stuff he’ll be announcing then. Oooh.

Psystar, that maker of those uber-controversial Mac clones, has created something else we never thought would see the light of day: Mac OS X Service Pack 1. Well, sorta.

Aside from its brazen hardware cloning, it installs Leopard onto these Frankenstein machines, in direct violation of provisions of the Leopard EULA that forbid 3rd party sales and installs of the operating system. Not cowed in the slightest by Steve & His Legal Eagles, now it even has the cheek to actually improve on Leopard by fixing some inherent problems in the OS, including glitches in Time Machine, Keyboard Viewer and various other niggles.

Beginning this Monday the various patches, bug fixes and workarounds will come preinstalled in shipping units, but existing users can download the bunch, which constitutes what is essentially Service Pack 1, from the Psystar website. Some fixes are specific to their hardware, like one that repairs conflicts between Apple’s Airport Extreme router and the Realtek network card that ships with the Psystar boxes, while some actually improve on Leopard, like support for new versions of Java and adding international standards for networked devices.

Oooh. Now we’ve seen everything. Whoever these guys are, they’ve got big ones, don’t they?

In the meantime, we wonder why Apple hasn’t lowered the boom on these cheeky bashi-bazouks. It’s gonna be fun when it finally happens, that’s for sure.

(Via InformationWeek)