We love September 9th? Why? Because 2 years in a row Apple has chosen September 9th as the official date for new iPod releases! This year is shaping up to be no exception. Tomorrow at 1pm EST/10am PST Steve Jobs will host the special event for the media. There are plenty of rumors this year to be excited about, so let’s run through the list:

The Beatles coming to iTunes (finally!)

Tonight Yoko Ono leaked news that the entire Beatles catalog would be released to iTunes, possibly as early as tomorrow, to coincide with the international release of The Beatles edition of the popular “Rock Band” video game.

New iPods with cameras and increased storage

The iPod Touch is rumored to be getting an upgrade that includes a camera, similar to the iPhones. Will the iPod Nanos and iPod Classics also receive the upgrade? Our sources tell us they will.

Also, expect the entire iPod line to get a capacity upgrade. 60 GB iPod Touch’s anyone?!

iTunes Pre-cut Ringtones

Do you hate the fact that you have to purchase a song and then pay another 99 cents so you can cut it up into a ringtone? Tomorrow Apple is rumored to be announcing pre-cut ringtones. Will this make the labels as happy as it will users?

iTunes 9

iTunes is due for an upgrade. Why wasn’t it just included with Snow Leopard? Strong chance of this happening.

It looks like a certain Yoko Ono may have leaked information regarding Apple’s September 9th event, stealing Steve Jobs thunder in his return to the stage since his secretive surgery earlier this year. For years now Apple has been working to bring The Beatles catalog to its iTunes music store, to no avail. However, tonight Sky News posted a quote from an interview with Yoko Ono:

“The whole of the Beatles back catalogue will be made available to buy on iTunes, Yoko Ono has told Sky News.”

The article is now showing a blank page on the site but was cached by Google for a short amount of time. The cache has now mysteriously disappeared from Google as well, in record time.

The Beatles catalog has been rumored to be coming to iTunes for a while but was written off recently with little indication or leakage of any information on the deal. The September 9th date is significant because it is also the international release date of The Beatles highly anticipated “Rock Band” video game.

Keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned for full details after Apple’s September 9th event.

TechCrunch had a very interesting article tonight, titled “The iPod, As We Know It, Is Dying” which points out some valid points about the iPod, however, we disagree that the iPod is going to be going anywhere in the next 5 years.

During its quarterly earnings call today, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer focused a lot of attention on what the company is now calling its “pocket products.” That is, the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPod. You’ll notice that Apple has taken to separating out the iPod touch from the rest of the iPod line. And that makes sense, given it shares many more similarities with the iPhone. But it’s also for another reason: The iPod, as we know it, is dying.

Of the three pocket products, two saw huge year-over-year growth this quarter, one did not. While iPhone sales grew a massive 626% year-over-year, iPod touch sales actually grew just about 130% too. And while Apple may consider the iPod touch outside of the iPod line, for financial purposes, it’s still counted with them. So when you hear that overall the iPod family saw a 7% decline year over year, you know that the actual iPod numbers minus the iPod touch, must not be very good at all.

And while Apple wouldn’t specifically give those numbers, Oppenheimer did note that the iPhone and iPod touch are very much “cannibalizing” the stand-alone MP3 iPod market. Apple still has over 70% of the MP3 player market, but it’s probably safe to assume that the overall pie which Apple has 70% of, is going to start shrinking soon (if it hasn’t already), at least in the U.S. The way Oppenheimer spoke today about what he calls the “traditional mp3 players” was almost like a eulogy.

And for good reason. I’d be fairly surprised if Apple updates its hard-drive based iPod classic ever again. It will likely continue to sell it for a while, and may even do something with the price. But the thought of Apple devoting any time to reworking this dinosaur at this point, seems pointless.

We now carry an iPhone for our music, but there are still things that we actually prefer about the iPod Classic, like, the price point, the storage capacity, the durability, and more. Worrying about breaking you $700 32GB iPhone sucks. It makes using an iPhone for potentially dangerous things, like snowboarding or bmxing, extremely risky, no pun intended.

We just don’t see the iPod getting anything but better over the next 10 years, even if it does evolve a little bit!

Has anyone else noticed that Jailbreakme.com, the site that lets you instantly jailbreak your iPhone or iPod Touch so you can install third party applications, can’t be reached from Apple stores? On Friday we tried accessing the site from desktops, iPod Touchs and iPhones within the Apple store, using the stores Wi-Fi network and couldn’t access the site. We tried pinging the site and the IP address resolved properly but we weren’t even able to ping the site. The only way we were able to get to the site was over AT&T’s EDGE network from the stores display model iPhones.

Is this happening to anyone else from their local Apple retail store? Has anyone found any other iPhone hacking related sites that are banned by Apple?

What’s hot with Apple right now? The AppleTV. It’s everywhere! Every electronics site on the internet is talking about it. We had the chance to check it out at Apple’s new New York City Apple Store and it was pretty cool. The monitors they had it hooked up to were super high res and most of the movies on there played back nicely. But the real reason there’s so much buzz around the AppleTV is because people are hacking the crap out of it! People are doing things we never would have thought of with it and have even turned it into a full fledged desktop computer. For $299 you can’t beat the price!

Just this week Apple introduced 8-core Mac Pro desktop workstations! That’s some serious processing power!

There’s also a lot of talk about Adobe’s release of Creative Suite 3 for OS X. We’re looking forward to finally having a Universal Binary version of Photoshop that runs natively on Intel CPUs. It took Adobe almost two years to port CS over to Intel! So for any kind of graphics work, you’ll see a huge improvement with CS3.

The iPod shuffle must be doing really well this Spring because I’m seeing it everywhere. They were flying off the shelves at the Apple Story in New York. If you don’t already have some sort of iPod, you should look into the iPod shuffle because it’s only $79 now and holds 1GB of music.

Apple is one of the hottest companies of 2007. With all the attention Apple’s been getting lately there are more and more sites popping up covering everything Apple. So how do you weed out the junk and find the best Mac resources? Here’s our list of the 10 must have Apple links for when you need Apple news, information, software or help.

1. The Official Apple Discussion Forums are filled with thousands of Macintosh and iPod users from around the world. If you have any sort of question about your Apple product, this is the place to go.

2. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has tons of Mac product info and plenty of tips and advice on everything Apple.

3. Digg is a social media site, where users submit stories and other users vote on which ones make the homepage. Apple is consistently one of the most popular topics.

4. VersionTracker is the best site for free third-party Apple applications and demos of shareware applications. If it’s not on VersionTracker, it’s probably not out there.

5. Apple’s Wikipedia entry provides a very nice, in depth, history of Apple Inc.

6. Macworld publishes a print magazine dedicated to Apple. These people eat, sleep, and breathe Mac.

7. MacRumor’s Buyers Guide lets you know when you should or shouldn’t buy you next piece of Apple hardware.

8. VLC for Mac OS X is what Quicktime should be. If you have any videos that you can’t play properly with Quicktime, then VLC is for you.

9. Technorati will help you find any Apple related news or tags across the entire Blogosphere.

10. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where you can browse Apple sites bookmarked by users all around the world. The things you can find here are endless!