What's the problem with iPods? Supply has been an issue, with customers and retailers joining together to bicker over that last iPod Nano come holiday time. If Apple has anything to do with it, next Christmas it will be a little easier. That is, if you're a sucker for anything that rolls out of a vending machine. It seems as if there will be 180 of the new Zoom @ Macy's vending machines -- scheduled to stock iPods -- in stores by the fall. I, for one, would much rather buy the new $29 Nike+iPod Sport in a vending machine in one of my fave running spots. Now there's an interesting business plan!

If investors heard about the new vending machines, though, they weren't impressed. AAPL was down 23 cents to $63.15 in the same end-of-day malaise that struck the rest of the market. It's a pity, as AAPL opened extremely strong, up to $65.19 in the first minutes of the trading day on below-average volume.

Apple always has to be different. But today, everyone cheered as the company brought out a version of their pretty laptop, the MacBook, in matt black (yes, that's the same finish as your boring old PC). Our sister site, Engadget, took the MacBook for a spin and declared it "a pretty freaking great value" (but they're not doing black, for the record). The Apple Insider hails the removable (by an actual user!) hard disks. No more purely cosmetic screws!

It wasn't all black hearts and roses, though; MacWorld UK today mourned the locking down of OS X. Thanks to concerns of piracy, Apple closed down its open source code so that developers can no longer tinker with its operating system. Bad for pirates is also bad for very advanced users; says Tom Yager, "there are ways to address the piracy issue without stripping the critical and defining quality of openness from OS X."

AAPL stock responded by ticking up 25 cents to $65.26 on lower-than-average volume. Evidently the market, while intrigued, isn't ready to jump unreservedly on board for black is the new MacBook.

[Photo redjar]