Brand: MacNews

Credit Suisse First Boston late last night cautioned investors that iMac sales for the quarter are not expected to meet Wall Street forecasts this quarter and could significantly reduce Apple’s earnings. CSFB is estimating that 150,000 new iMacs will ship by the end of the quarter, compared to the Street’s 200,000 to 250,000 estimates. Furthermore, CSFB told clients that even its 150,000 estimate may be too optimistic.

Walter Mossberg’s latest Personal Technology column in The Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required; article not yet freely available) compares Apple’s iPod with the equally priced Rio Riot. While sporting four times the storage capacity of the iPod for the same price, Mossberg far prefers the iPod because of its smaller size, FireWire interface, and elegant software integration with iTunes.

The iPod’s portability coupled with its high-speed FireWire connection lends the device to far more than just playing music: it opens the doors for quickly and easily lifting software from an unprotected Mac, explains Wired. The article recounts the tale of one man who witnessed an iPod owner walk into CompUSA, plug their iPod into a Mac that was on display, copy the Microsoft Office suite from the demo Mac to the iPod, and quietly exit the store — US$499 software suite in your pocket.

Apple has released a Mac OS 9 DVD Player update for 550MHz and 667 MHz model PowerBook G4s. The new version fixes an issue that occurs when using the DVD Player for extended periods of time or while using it simultaneously with other applications that use the graphics processor.

Thunder Lizard Productions today announced that the ninth annual Photoshop Conference will be held in San Francisco from April 8-10. The conference will focus exclusively on Adobe Photoshop 7, providing attendees with hands-on training of the software’s new retouching features, new tool and palette controls, the Pattern Maker filter, and more.