Let's get the legal stuff out of the way first. It seems that Steve Jobs was questioned by the Feds last week, but nobody's talking (yet?) about the specifics of the interview. The plaintiff in the options-related shareholders suit against Apple has been named, and it's a biggie: the New York City Employees Retirement System, which manages an $89-billion fund that includes one million Apple shares.

Now that that update is over, let's get back to more pressing matters - such as whether "analyst" Rob Enderle, who recently opined that "2007 may be starting out as one of Apple's worst years this decade," is actually a tool of the Microsofties. We say no, of course not - Rob's merely a tool of his own tortured reasoning. No matter what 2007 brings, however,we fear that pundits will continue to diss Apple for being, well, Apple. But we do have one piece of advice to Jobs: Never tick off the accounting corps - their pencils are mighty sharp.

Last week, you may remember, we cited a ComputerWorld article that referred to Steve Jobs's preannouncement of the iPhone a "colossal mistake." Well, today Jason O'Grady responds to that article with his own "10 reasons why announcing the iPhone six months early was a stroke of genius." Advantage, O'Grady.

It appears that the chip powering the iPhone is, as we guessed, an XScale processor, but it's from the Marvell Technology Group and not Intel; Intel sold the XScale design to that Santa Clara, CA company last year. No matter - one blogger goes so far as to suggest that Apple's new slogan should be "Thanks to OS X, the CPU is irrelevant." He may have a point.

In other news: Leander Kahney of Wired News thinks that Apple shutting out third-party developers from the iPhone is a good thing. We disagree - Apple should distribute a bullet-proof set of APIs and let 100 widgets (and mini-apps) bloom. Pam Baker of MacNewsWorld poses the question, "...will Apple peel out on the race for dominance in the home?" We think not - "dominance" is too strong a word in a mass market in which most media consumers are perfectly happy with their cable company's set-top box. And finally, if you're in the market for a new job, the good folks over at Infinite Loop (ArsTechnica's Mac-oriented channel) are "looking for a few good iNerds." Come join the ranks of us ink-stained wretches who cover All Things Mac: The Few. The Proud. The Underpaid.