A few Macworld infonuggets

A few infonuggets gleaned from phone conversations with top Apple executives last night:

Mac mini: The Mac firm makes no apologies about not including a keyboard and mouse with the Mac mini. Many who buy the diminutive Mac already have such peripherals, or "those items are easy to acquire," an exec said.

iPod shuffle: In explaining why it didn't put a screen on its new flash-based player, the exec said the screens and controls on competing flash players leave much to be desired. But, um, isn't a mediocre screen better than none at all?

"We decided to change the rules," the exec said, by relying heavily on a shuffle feature so users have the equivalent of a "personal radio station that plays what is yours. Instead of you finding the music, the music finds you."

iWork '05: Mac observers have noted (here and here) that the Pages program built into the iWork suite looks more like a page-layout program than word-processing software.

Well, Apple says, it does both. "It's born into this world with a big step forward" by integrating the advanced graphics technologies found in the Keynote presentation program along with top-notch text-processing tools, an exec said.

iLife '05: Many digital photographers are elated about support for the RAW file format in the new version of iPhoto, part of the iLife suite. This move was a no-brainer, Apple said, because more and more digital shutterbugs are opting for advanced SLR-style cameras while the RAW format has been filtering downward in the digital-camera food chain.   

The new version of iDVD supports more recordable and rewritable DVD formats, including DVD+R and DVD+RW, which makes sense since "all currently shipping (Macintosh machines) with (DVD-burning SuperDrives) support burning to DVD±RW media, including iMac G5s, eMac, PowerMac, iBook, PowerBook and now Mac mini," an Apple spokesman said in an e-mail.