Apple Music Service

Not sure if this has been discussed before (I didn't see it though). Apple appears to be positioning itself to be the first major company to endorse AAC as the new standard. The linked story mentions Apple starting a music download service that will utilize AAC exclusively. News of this new music service come just as rumors of iTunes 4 and new iPods are flying at a brisk pace. It doesn't take much to assume the new version of iTunes & the iPods will have AAC support built-in.

Hopefully this will raise the bar for portables. Flash memory is cheap so there should be no reason for companies to not include AAC, MP3, and even ogg or mpc codecs.