Hmm - but I would argue that Office has been able to phone it in for the past 15 years - and so where has Elop learned to handle to difficulties of a real market place? And even though we know Microsoft is rife with infighting I doubt anyone messes much with the Office division - so he wouldn't have got many hard knocks there either.

Still seems like an odd choice.

Gruber, is that you?

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/07/17/nokia

A big difference between suspicion and knowledge.

We suspect those products are in development - but who knows when they will be released.

The imminent arrival iPhone 4G is now well known. That makes a big difference to people's purchashing plans.

I don't think so. I think Apple (and Steve Jobs) are ruthless about killing what they see as legacy tech. And they're pissed at Adobe for dragging their heels in adopting the new Cocoa APIs for UI development.

I think Apple (rightly or wrongly) have decided their mission is to drag the tech world kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

I guess you've not heard of the iPod Touch? And Apple is just practicing the Serenity Prayer:

"God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things that I can;
And the wisdom to know the difference."

App Store - something it can change. The Web - something it can't. It knows the difference.

Robert.

Apple also likes to leak hints about a new product category - they never leak about updates to an existing product - that would dampen sales. Leaking about a new product - that makes people wait instead of purchasing a competing product.

PCs and laptops are personal - it would be nice to have a "general use" computer for people who want to look stuff up on the web etc. Basically a computer that is open to anyone in the house without fear of losing ones privacy. And to have something freely portable - excellent. I would buy two - one for the living room and one for the family room.

If there was free movement of people around the world I wouldn't care. But there isn't, so people are stuck in the economy they find themselves. Thus if it is in decline - I (and probably they) care very much.

Agreed - home phones have the worst interfaces. We have one that shows the recent calls - is there a button to click that lets you easily return the call it's showing? There might be - but I haven't found it yet. An obvious use case that was completely missed.

I think what's changed is that since it released OS X (with its Darwin underpinnings) Apple is straddling thing open/closed worlds and so makes the argument more difficult to make.

Microsoft is clearly proprietary.
Linux is clearly open.
Apple is somewhere in the middle.

This is only interesting if we could get some citation for these claims. First I've heard of a "brain/brawn drain" from Britain to Oz... certainly have been plenty of inventing and building going on in Britain since the deportations stopped (radar, jet engine etc) not sure what high tech advance Oz can lay claim to? You make it sound like Britain turned into the future portrayed in the Time Machine! :)

There's a bar/restaurant effectively on the Apple Campus (it's outside the building but I bet someone with a decent arm could hit it from the main entrance - it's a stroll across the parking lot - interesting stop on the walk is the "Steve Jobs parking spot"). While visiting the campus for some dev tech support about a year ago we were invited to have lunch there by a senior Apple engineer specifically because we could get beer (rather than at Cafe Macs which is dry).

So Apple at least is a bit more relaxed about this it seems.

This whole debate is so tedious.

A laptop computer has 3 main areas for comparison:

1. Power (the computer hardware itself - cpu, ram, drive, screen)
2. Hardware Ergonomics (the portability of the package - weight, form, battery life)
3. Software Ergnomics (the usability of the OS/software)

When doing price comparisons we only seem to focus on 1/3 of the total package - are the other 2 thirds worthless or worth a lot less than the power alone?

These days I don't think so.

I think you're thinking of Dutch.

What has this repsonse to do with music studios? The Atari ST range has a solid reputation in the music production world for having rock-steady MIDI timing.