Someone must have rolled over in his grave when MacUser.com's Aaron Freedman wrote the following words: "I never thought I’d say this, but it seems that Microsoft has a product that works better with the Mac than the Sony equivalent." He was talking about his observation that the Xbox 360 system meshes with Apple systems, but that the Sony PS3 didn't.

However, just looking back at our coverage of both consoles, and the comments to Aaron's article, sounds like he needs to make a revision of observation.

There's the observation that "the PS3 can't play music directly off the iPod." Uh, Victor B., can you help me out here? "... the 20 GB video iPod was recognized by the PS3, but you'll need to use the above-mentioned Display All feature to view everything on your iPod." (The "Display All" feature is simply pressing Triangle to browse through - and play - the content of connected media storage devices like the iPod).

And besides, as a MacUser commenter pointed out, both the PS3 and Xbox 360 won't play iTunes-signed music content. But then again, that's Apple's DRM, not MS or Sony.

Now there are things that the Xbox can do with Apple that the PS3 can't, but that's because of the one-year lead time of the Microsoft console, which gives hackers time to play with both devices. The 360 controller could be used with a Mac through a hacked driver and the USB cable, which we won't visit for all the potential EULA repercussions. Even Aaron admits that the SIXAXIS communicates through Bluetooth, which can, in due time, talk to a Mac as well (again, with all potential EULA repercussions). And the SIXAXIS has a USB connection too, by the way.

That's Aaron's admission: in due time, hackers will probably develop more drivers and code that will enable the PS3 to communicate with the Mac and iPod and God-knows-what-else, creating a very weird menage-a-troi lovefest electronica that neither MS, nor Sony, nor Apple would have envisioned (toss in the Wii and now we have a party!). Enough said.

HD-DVD goes under. Down Under. Early next year will see Microsoft's newest baby, the HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360, launch in Australia. Hey, if your asking for specific dates, we can't give them. All we have from the press release forwarded to us by XboxZone.com.au's Kayser Sose is "early next year".

We do have other specifics from the PR to share, however. It's going to launch at AU$ 249.95. As Kayser Sose himself notes, that amounts to 191 greenbacks and 46 pennies, which is a bit less than the US$ 199.00 it's going for at Amazon.com. Cheaper than Stateside, indeed.

Plugging the HD-DVD into Xbox 360s should be no problem since the last Live Update should have taken care of that. Availability of movies is also taken care of thanks to support from Universal Studios, whose titles "King Kong", "Serenity", "Jarhead", and "The Bourne Supremacy" are or will be available by next year (Nothing on movie bundles with the add-on, though).

Oh, and you can theoretically use your 360 HD-DVD add-on with your Windows PC. (Whispers) But that's supposed to be kept on the down-low, all hush-hush, since we're not sure if there's a EULA violation somewhere in there. Shhh.

Thanks for the tip, Kayser!

Perhaps HD-DVD Emergence Day emerges twice - but for reasons not covered in Microsoft's End User License Agreement (EULA). On the same day as Microsoft unveiled the HD-DVD addon for the Xbox 360, BluePrint found a way to make the add-on work on a Windows XP PC.

Xbox-Scene reports on the "XBOX360 HD-DVDRom UDF Reader v2.5 Windows XP BluePrint". It's essentially the Toshiba driver used in their first generation of HD-DVDs, and which allows the PC to communicate with the HD-DVD reader. These are unmodified by BluePrint, as they didn't create them themselves, and there are some issues with "there (sic) availability... limited to specific machines which were (sic) familiar with from our places of business".

The drivers mean that PCs can now read HD-DVDs as HD-DVDs, using the Xbox 360 add-on. Which means, says BluePrint, you can copy the contents of the HD-DVD into your PC. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. This isn't a clear-cut rip of the HD-DVD movie for starters ("you will not be directly copying any hd-dvd's as of yet" due to the dual-layer, 30GB format of HD-DVDs), and second, Xbox-Scene ain't hosting the drivers as they could be a violation of the EULA, and for that neither are we.