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A couple of weeks ago, I surmised that because Apple enjoys a dominating end-to-end position in the digital music market, most consumers are never really affected by the DRM restrictions they impose -- if users are buying music to play on their iPods, then they don't really come in contact with the DRM. If consumers aren't bothered by DRM, or perhaps not even aware that it exists, will "no DRM" resonate as a marketing message? Recently released sales data seems to suggest so.

While CES is raging in Las Vegas, most of us are wondering what Apple has in store for their own annual expo, Macworld, which kicks off a week from now. We've combed through some of the top Mac rumors sites to pick out our favorite Macworld predictions and assigned a percentage of probability to each.

Last year it was the iPhone, two years ago it was the Intel iMac, the year before that the iPod shuffle and the Mac mini. While clearly, not every year is as exciting as the last, Apple always has something in store for us. History would suggest that this year's announcement won't be as earth shattering as the iPhone last year, but one never really knows what the Great and Mysterious Jobs has planned.

A lot of things happened in 2007 that seemed to threaten Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market. Microsoft launched its new Zune MP3 players, which received mostly glowing reviews, and they kept their installed user base happy with major firmware updates for old players. Meanwhile, Amazon launched a major DRM-free MP3 download service at a cut-rate (compared to Apple's). But generally, the facts still point to Apple dominance for awhile to come.