New and Noteworthy: Media seeing Macs as affordable; New Beatles/iTunes speculation; iMac=good; Today's humor column

Media seeing Macs as affordable In his Cult of Mac blog, Leander Kahney notes a subtle, but growing, shift in the major media over the past few months: suddenly Macs are being described as affordable: "For a lot of tech writers (and consumers), price has always been the biggest sticking point when considering a Mac; it's the ultimate deal breaker. But I think we'll see 'suprisingly affordable,' or 'cheaper than their competitors,' more and more, and that it will play a very important role in Apple's continued resurrection." More.

New Beatles/iTunes speculation On the heels of a Variety story claiming that the current legal row between Apple and Apple Corp could result in the largest financial settlement in history, CNET reports on rumors of a more modest agreement: "Music industry sources have said representatives of the surviving Beatles are...asking for as much as $15 million for six months of exclusive rights to the music." More.

Mossberg: iMac Good Walter Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal's Personal Technology columnist, reviews the new iMac G5 and comes away quite pleased, calling the new computer "the most elegant desktop computer I've ever used, a computer that is not only uncommonly beautiful but fast and powerful, virus-free and surprisingly affordable." We think he likes it. More.

Today's humor column We occasionally find a column or article that is so "out there" we suspect its secret purpose is actually humor. Today's installment is a finance column in Suburban Chicago News that begins by calling the iPod a "silly, useless, nonproductive gimmick," and just gets worse from there. Enjoy. More.

Previously on MacFixIt:

• iMac G5 (#3): Fan noise; System install disks do not work on other Macs; more
• Power Mac G5 Uniprocessor firmware (#7): More on RAM problems
• Potential fix for .Mac backup problems
• iDVD 4.x: Possible solution for burning/multiplexing issues
• PowerBooks suddenly falling asleep without low battery warning under Mac OS X 10.3.5 (#3)
• Utilities Updates: GraphicConverter 5.2.3; Archive 5.1.8; sterMachine 2.0.1; more
• New and Noteworthy: AP: iMac G5 "short on extras"; Verizon/Lucent launch wireless broadband in additional U.S. Markets

Resources