A long time in the making and wrestling with record companies has finally paid off for Apple.  It seems Apple has finally won the battle of DRM-free downloads on the iTunes store.  

"The deal reported by sources speaking to CNET News.com would see Apple break its longtime insistence on a fixed per-track rate for songs and give in to frequent demands from Sony, Universal and Warner that would change the pricing depending on the popularity and recentness of a given song."

An announcement will probably be made tomorrow at the MacWorld Expo as one would expect.  To go along with such a deal are sources reporting that AT&T and Apple have reached an agreement which would allow us to further use our bandwidth we pay for every month on the iPhone.  This means we will be able to download iTunes songs via 3G and hopefully podcasts larger than 10MB, which most already are.

We hope to hear more details on this news and more tomorrow at MacWorld.

[via AppleInsider]

Amongst the rumors coming from the upcoming  2009 MacWorld Expo is the iPod Shuffle.  FBR Capital Markets believe the shuffle to be coming in the first quarter.  In their statement they state, a ”new and smaller version” of the iPod Shuffle that may appear some time during the first quarter.”  While this may or may not be true, the Shuffle is due for an overhaul despite its very functional and sleek look.  The photo above is an obvious concept, but the shuffle could only be improved upon by adding a screen in our opinion, and the concept gives us an idea of the possibilities.

[via AppleInsider]