UPDATE: As it turns out, it did not ship, it was a mistake by Apple. I should have received the "Your Order Has Been Delayed" rather than the "Your Order Has Shipped" message. Also, we got 9a377a, meaning that Apple's build that they released was at least 9 days old by the time we got it.

Congrats, everyone.
The end is officially near!

Allow me to elaborate... My AppleTV has shipped, implying that iTunes 7.1 has been finalized, meaning that the one thing that I have been theorizing as holding up the Monthly Developer Seed of Leopard is now no longer an issue.

What does this mean?
It means that in the very near future, we will be getting a download for iTunes.

I will be checking ADC once per hour, on the hour for the next few days. As soon as Leopard is posted, you will know.

Expected build number: 9a385 (Educated guess, no insider knowledge)

Sadly I don't think a new beta is any closer. A work colleage of mine had their AppleTV shipped last thursday. Also nothing to stop apple just making itunes 7.1 a download anytime.

As we are doing guesses, mine is no beta until 2nd week of march, when there will be an apple event annoucing the new features (if any) and a release of 16th April.

While there is nothing to stop Apple from making iTunes 7.1 a download item, they did say originally that AppleTV required iTunes 7.1.

The whole idea of shipping products that will not work in the real world because they are lacking the software to sync with them is crazy.

I hope that Apple would be a little smarter than sending people nicely painted, very beautiful bricks that are completely unusable out of the box.

Too bad... It seems that Apple TV is delayed : http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/02/26/appletv/index.php

That's interesting. I'll have to ask my friend at work if his has really shipped or he got the email in error.

I seriously am wondering if the Macworld article is simply due to the update on the Apple Store, reflecting that orders placed now will ship in Mid-March.

I sure don't want to think that the e-mail I received was in error.

I would have said hooray if not for the pessimistic phrasing of the words "the end is near".

You mean people are actually buying the AppleTV?

I wouldn't mind one... It seems like a good solution for me since I already encode all my movies to iTunes/Quicktime formats anyway that the Apple TV should be able to play.

I hope to pick one up once I get the 2nd half of the payment from the sale of my old Alienware laptop.

still looks down a stripped down Mac mini to me....

And I don't have the money for the Mini, but all I'd use the mini for is what the Apple TV does.

It works for some people, but not others. It works for me and I'll have 802.11n on my CD MacBook soon so it'll be running all at full speed too.

I'm also extremely excited to see what Linux guys can do with this hardware.

Well iTunes 7.1 is here, just noticed on update. yay!

As far as I read, there are a lot of bugs yet... maybe for May?

I agree. It's only got potential in America.
Everywhere else, it's useless

I don't think it has potential anywhere.

If it didn't have potential, how do you explain the hard fact that there's lots of people buying (or planning to buy) it?

Define lots

Didn't somebody say Apple has more pre-orders then expected?

That's a lot.

Apple: Ahh, we expect 2 pre-prders..

after release:

Apple: Wow!! We have 3 pre-orders!!!



Somebody: Wow, thats more then expected, thats a lot!


*scnr*

There were some blog posts like this one in January, and I guess he is referring to these news:
http://applerecon.com/2007/01/24/apple-tv-...y-expectations/

I don't know how reliable this information is, and I also don't really have an opinion on what the definition of "lots" should be here. Is it 100,000 units, 300,000 units, 1M? But if the post is correct, at least Apple was thinking that 100,000 is enough, so according to them, there are "lots" of preorders.

At least now that iTunes 7.1 and 10.4.9 are out in the wild, some more resources can be put into Leopard.

10.4.9 is out....
The day of 10.5.0 draws ever closer

That is assuming that there is not a 10.4.10, 10.4.11, 10.4.12, etc.
Unlikely, but possible.

I am smiling both on the inside and the out!
~Adrian

I can tell... your display picture is that obvious

lmao, true!

i can wait..... forever!

Who thinks that we will see something super exciting come this Saturday?

Sure, Saturday is a really odd day to do any announcements but think about it...
Exactly 6 years ago on Saturday, Apple released Mac OS X to the world, also on a Saturday.

Personally, I doubt that we will see anything come out of them. Think about it this way, whenever Apple holds an event or does anything interesting their stock goes up considerably. The stock markets will be closed. We are looking at a new company that is all about major hype; it is the secret to their success.

But still, there is always hoping.