All atwitter at Macworld

The legion of Mac followers camped out (funny blog from last year’s campout here) in chilly San Francisco overnight last night, in advance of today’s super secret speech by Apple boss Steve Jobs at Macworld. It’s occasions like this that Jobs announces spiffy new gadgets, as he did with iPhone. Predictions this year include some sort of video service and a super-light Mac laptop.

MPR’s tech guru, Jon Gordon, who also writes WavLength and Future Tense, is at Macworld and writes to say he’s twittering the speech.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata, the Pioneer Press techie is there with him, also twittering, as is Dwight Silverman.

11:06 a update – Twitter server goes belly up. I like to think I had something to do with it. How do you like them apples, Jobs!

11:30 a update – The server is back up.

11:31 a update – Down again. I think we can fairly conclude that Twitter is a lousy news platform. Rest easy, mainstream media.

12:19 p update As mentioned above, the announcement is video rental on iTunes, refinements to iPhone, and a slim laptop. Jon’s got it on his Twitter page (which is back up). Get it while you can.

Jon also reports the HD version of movies will cost more. And that brings up a subject that nobody seems to be talking about as we go to mandatory HDTV. Why does it have to cost more? We’re being forced by government edict to buy only HDTVs. The cable company charges more for HD service. Movies cost more to rent. Why?

When analog “goes away,” will they lower the price? They say TVs are going to come down in price. When?