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Has it been 74 days already? This weekend Apple sold it’s one-millionth iPhone, a few days after they slashed the price by a third to jolt sales.

With this news Apple shares went up $4.94, or 3.8 percent to 136.71. Apple thought they would hit the one million iPhone mark by the end of September, so they are ahead of what they had predicted. By comparison, it took two years for Apple to sell one million iPods.

Apple knocked $200 off the price of the 8-gigabyte iPhone last week bringing its price to $399. Apple also discontinued the 4-gigabyte version.

The price cut angered Apple customers who bought the iPhone for the full price. Price slashing is common in the cell phone industry, but not common for Apple. Jobs issued an apology the next day and offered customers $100 credits if they bought their iPhone within 14 days of the price cut.

The same day Apple slashed the iPhone price to $399, it unveiled a new iPod, also $399 and called the iPod Touch. The iPod Touch is essentially the same as the iPhone but without the cell phone capability.

Automated data backup just got more affordable and interesting for the mainstream user. Meet Drobo – The world’s first storage robot.

Drobo keeps your data safe by automatically monitoring and reparing problems that could put your data to risk. Drobo also automatically controls all aspects of your storage management. There’s no configuration or management consoles — Essentially, Drobo does all the work for you, handling any complex storage management. Data Robotics, who created Drobo, claims Drobo beats RAID hands down.

Since our hard drives are getting filled up with a whole lot of rich media (photos, video, movies, music, etc.), our storage needs are growing. That’s the cool thing about Drobo, you can set it up with just a couple of hard drives and grow from there. You can upgrade your capacity on-the-fly and add drives to Drobo at any time. You can even mix ‘n match capacities, brands or speeds. This allows you to have no downtime, data migration or waiting to access new capacity.

At $499 USD (at the time of this article), you get security – non-stop data protection – if the status lights are green, your data is safe. Drobo has a simple LED management that are as simple as a traffic light. In addition to the green (safe) lights, you have yellow which means Drobo is 85% full and red, which means your data is not safe so you should add or replace a drive immediately.

Drobo Specs:

• 3.5″ SATA I or SATA II hard disk drives
• Full or half-height, no carriers required
• Choose the drive manufacturer, capacity (mixed capacities ok), and spindle speed or cache that fits your current storage needs

Drobo’s Size: Width Height Length
inches 6.3 6.3 10.7
mm 152.4 160.02 271.78

Power

• Idle system (standby, drives off) = 5 watts
• Typical idle system – idle, drive spin down mode (one drive) = 12 watts
• Typical busy system (four drives) = 40 watts

Input
100-240V AC, 50/60 Hz

Box Content

• Drobo storage robot
• External power supply with U.S. 110V AC power cord
• 6′ USB 2.0 cable
• User Guide and Quick Start Instructions
• Drobo Resource CD includes:

° Drobo Dashboard Software
° Help files
° How-to Videos
° Electronic Documentation

Operating System Support

• Windows 2000 (Professional, Server, Advanced Server)
• Windows 2003 Server
• Windows XP (Home, Professional, Media Center Edition)
• Windows Vista (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate)
• Apple OS-X 10.4 and later

File System Support

• NTFS
• HFS+

Certification: Emissions
FCC Part 15 Class B and Safety: UL, cUL

System Management

• Automatic (No software required)
• Optional Drobo Dashboard Software Included

Security
Kensington lock port (lock not included)

Warranty
1 Year Limited Warranty