Back to the usual review this week, after our 
Whether it's wishful thinking, educated guessing or true leakage is unclear, but the photo nerds are now abuzz about a Nikon D400 follow-up to the 
I love Sonos, the super synced-up wireless music home system, but have always been a little freaked out by the price, about $750 to start, including the increasingly old-school-looking $400 scroll-wheel Controller. When I saw the 
What's great about the one ZonePlayer is that you immediately get the AirPort Express-like ability to grab music from your Mac or PC, plus the iTunes Remote app's ability to control it from a little handheld, but that's just the beginning. The ZonePlayer comes with the ability to serve up web radio, Rhapsody, Napster, Pandora, Last.fm and Best Buy Music, all without a computer.
But I can walk away from the laptop (leaving it on) and instead pick up an iTouch lying on the coffee table, which lets me view the same exact tracks, and just as fast.
You probably now that Sonos offers free 30-day no-credit-card-required trials of Rhapsody, Napster and Sirius—the key, I think, is to try all three in a row, giving you basically 60 days of free on-demand music sampling, and a month of decent satellite radio, before you choose one, if any.
After the super-syncability and the multiple sources of music, the third best thing about Sonos is the fact that it is constantly being upgraded. So even though there are some technical advantages to the newer hardware (wireless-N is the big one), the basic functionality is the same, meaning buying at clearance shouldn't be a problem.
We just got a tip that Best Buy was selling MacBooks and MacBook Pros for $100 each off the list price, and in at least one case $150 off (as Lizard King points out). This is an unusual phenomenon in the MSRP-only world of Apple products. We don't know how the deal came through, but the sale prices are for real—at least for now. If you see any other Apple stuff for sale over there at Best Buy, send us a tip or let us know in the comments below. Update: A tipster named Jack just told me that Apple Stores will be matching the deal "for the next few days." Anyone care to corroborate? [
Microsoft will relaunch Windows Live Search under a new brand sometime early next year, says a source within the company. What we don't know is what that new brand will be, although a When Apple started running the anti-Vista commercial (above) mocking Microsoft for spending $300 million on Vista's own ad campaign instead of on fixing its problems, I called it hypocritical:
Apple's advertising budget is also pretty massive. I mean, I see more Apple commercials on TV than ads for Barack Obama. Apple is on track to spend more than $3.5 billion on SG&A (selling, general, and administrative expenses) for its fiscal year that ended September 30. How much of that was spent on advertising? I don't know, but 10 percent doesn't seem unreasonable.
It turns out that I underestimated Apple's advertising budget. Lindsay Blakely at Bnet (a former Business 2.0 reporter) found the actual numbers in a subsequent SEC filing. In its 2008 fiscal year that just ended last September, Apple spent a whopping $486 million on advertising. (In fiscal year 2007, it spent $467 million, and in fiscal year 2006 it spent $338 million).
Half a billion dollars on marketing. No wonder I think Apple products are so great.
Update: Microsoft spends more on advertising across all of its combined businesses than Apple does, but its Windows business is what competes most directly with Apple. Microsoft's total advertising budget across all of its businesses, including Windows, Office, Xbox, and all the enterprise stuff, was the following (from the 10K): "Advertising expense was $1.2 billion, $1.3 billion, and $1.2 billion in fiscal years 2008, 2007, and 2006, respectively."
Microsoft's fiscal year ends in June, so these numbers do not reflect the $300 million Vista campaign. But that would have eaten up 25 percent of Microsoft's entire ad budget for any of the previous three years.
