News Roundup for November the 20th

I think we can conclude that rumours Apple’s decided to clock-off and put their feet up for the rest of the year are true. Confirmation that Steve’s hung-up his turtleneck and pottered off to his garden shed comes in the form of the latest software upgrade to his ‘hobby,’ the Apple TV. New features include some things about streaming music and stuff — yeah, all very cool and interesting — but mainly it seems to have been intended as a kick to the nuts for all those Boxee installers. But please don’t start with the mewling and puking. What have we told you before about doing stuff that makes Steve sad?

Wondering what handsome chunk of Mac hardware to take home this Holiday Buying Season? Well, first of all you may like to hold off for a little while until Æ’s own Holiday Buying Guide is released. (Which will be any day now, honest.) But even after that you may like to wait a little bit longer still, as reports suggest that Apple’s new year revamp will see quad core CPUs — possibly members of Intel’s new Core i7 family, depending on who you read — coming to the iMac. No, not releasing them until after everyone goes credit card crazy doesn’t make any sense to me, either, but then what do I know?

In other non-news, Apple is apparently continuing to discuss the possibility of un-DRMed music with the big labels. Whatever next? Apple in shock ‘continuing to research and develop other products’ shocker? (Shocking!)

Continuing to blatantly contradict our stance on gaming on the #1 device worldwide, we’re going to highlight two new additions to the App Store. Frentic looks like it should be a Trivial Pursuit clone, but is in fact a fast-paced puzzler. And we’ve mentioned the Cube FPS engine before. Well, now it’s finally available. It’s downloading as I type this, so don’t expect any more updates to the site for the next few days.

• Piccy from Cult of Mac