I'm not underwhelmed because of the hype nor because of the press. I ignore that stuff anyway. Having worked so many years so close to Apple, I know not to trust most of the speculation and rumors leading up to an event like this. A lot of it is just pulled out of thin air.

All that aside, I just don't think what was released was nearly competitive enough within the marketplace to make me think "wow, that's some cool stuff." And of course Apple don't need to have that type of release at the moment because they command such a long lead over anyone else. This lead has, for years, lead to some pretty crummy progress on their part though. When a company has this type of share however, it's nice to see them competing with themselves and continuing a strong path of innovation. Apple seem to always make a decent (or even grand) splash when something absolutely new comes out, but then it pretty much stops there. Even with the iPhone this is easy to see. The only exciting thing happening there are 3rd party apps.

My takes on the other stuff: Leica M9 - a super expensive point and shoot from a company that has done absolutely nothing remarkable in the digital realm. Leica digital products are as underwhelming as any non-desrcript P&S released month after month. The only thing going for them is nostalgia, IMO. I wouldn't pay $500 for an M8 nor M9. Seriously.

Facebook. I think it's getting obvious that this thing is a few steps lower on the social evolutionary ladder than AOL. My wife uses it and I cringe. Fingers crossed that it goes away in a few years. At least it's not as totally and completely useless as Twitter - which makes Apple look like it has no hype whatsoever.

Pandora... It's radio. Radio you have to pay for. No thanks.

Apple's iTunes LP format... You need a 2GHz Core 2 Duo minimum to use these new files. What? They're still 246kbit AAC. I would have liked to see an "album" format that costs $17 use a non-lossy codec. Most people won't give a crap, but I won't be buying any digital downloads at even half the price of a CD, let alone up to two times the price.