Have you been to Apple's website yet today? They have officially announced the arrival of the long-awaited 8-core 3GHz Mac Pro.

They have added the new machine to the top of the line, keeping the current quads where they were:

The Apple Mac Pro Product Line - April 4, 2007
• Two 2.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon ("Woodcrest") at $2,200
• Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon at $2,499
• Two 3.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon at $3,298

Is the first wave of legal, DRM free music downloads swelling at last?

Adobe is announcing the official release of their brand new Creative Suite 3 offerings this afternoon, and the announcement can be seen by anyone with an internet connection via the live webcast from New York City -- Today, Tuesday, March 27, 2007 at 3:30 PM eastern time -- just a reminder to tune in and see all the cool new features with live demos by Adobe gurus and all that good stuff.

David Kaplan at PaidContent.org put together a nice summary of how HBO is leveraging cable partners (including both Comcast and Cox in addition to Time Warner Cable, its sister company). The strategy includes everything from broadband trivia, to free VOD offering short form original films as well as other internet video strategies.

Everyone's talking about the NBC deal with News Corp, touting it as the "largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled."

AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! are the partners, under the theory the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend, they've pooled their resources to form an alternative distribution network to YouTube/Google.

The news today that Hachette Filipacchi is shutting down Premiere Magazine after its April issue struck a bit of a personal chord for me. Not because I like the magazine--haven't read it in years--but because my very first industry job was an internship at Premiere in fall 1996.

For creative people, there's often an ongoing tension between how much effort one should devote to creating great content by telling original stories, and how much effort one should put towards marketing/promotion of your creative project...in effect, "pitching" the story to the industry.

Ok, now I'm getting really excited. Whenever Apple announces Special Media Events I get butterflies. Yes, I do. I admit, a total Mac-Geekâ„¢ at heart and in mind, and now I'm surfing the travel sites for good fares to Las Vegas. ThinkSecret says "Apple will have one of the largest presences at NAB." I know this is hype, but hey, I start to get really jazzed when I hear stuff like that.

AP reported Monday that Apple confirmed delaying the release date of its revolutionary wireless set-top iTunes player Apple TV.

"Wrapping up Apple TV is taking a few weeks longer than we projected, and we now expect to begin shipments mid-March," Apple spokeswoman Lynn Fox said Monday. She declined to comment further.

It's so easy to make mistakes as a media company. So many of them are run by ludites who have a real passion for quality content...and, sadly, that's simply not enough today.

Succeeding in tomorrow's media world is as much about creating quality content that appeals to your constituency as it is about having a really forward-thinking distribution strategy.