v, watching the same and thinking the same… amazed at how they’re using iphone as APP platform with polished simple apps. Other indicator… *I* am excited by what Apple is doing. Going to have to advance our Apple Consultant/Certification roadmap.

No shizbit, Vlad, once again you’re right on target. What would move a 20 year Microsoft flag waver like me to buy a Mac? Insanity, well maybe, but more and more of my customers are buying Macs and I better as hell learn how to use one.

If Entourage will run better than Outlook I’m all for it. And as for that bloated pig Word, I could easily get along with Word 2.0 or even WordPad.

I’m cringing as I write this but I have to be honest with myself.

Sadly, as a user of Entourage, I can say it is a retarded half-cousin of Outlook. The entire Microsoft Office suite on Mac is still a steaming pile even 2008. The performance of Excel for anything more than a glorified calculator is horrendous. Even on a Mac Pro. That’s pretty inexcusable.

When you really think about it the whole thing is fairly non-event, hardware wise. 3g? meh. Real GPS? nice, but meh. The price drop is maybe the most notable part. The .mac replacement with cloud sync’ing is nice. Nice enough that for $150 per year you can have 5 people set up with: shared cal, shared contacts, and OTA sync.

How about the announcement that in 10.6, Snow Leopard, the native Mac apps will have full support for Exchange 2007?

That means that Apple will be better at connecting to Exchange on OS X than Microsoft is.

Don’t read too much into a few people you know owning an iPhone. Apple barely figures on global sales:

http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11525049&fsrc=RSS

From where I’m standing I don’t see apple making much headway outside of the fashion crowd.
The latest HTC phones are slick - really slick. Blackberry users are as faithful as anything to their phones. People like what works.
I’m sure the iPhone will work well and will carve out a niche, but the competition is fierce and everyone is coming out with new phones.

If Apple didn’t license Microsoft Active Sync their 2.0 phone would be hardly news at all. I think that Apple did a great job withe the iPhone 1.0 but I doubt that they have it in them to keep up with the market.

Just look at the MAC OS. It really hasn’t changed in over 10 years. The same incompatibilities still exist.

Yawn.

We’re still drowning in a pile of too much crap technology.

If the stuff actually lives up to the hype then there’s a lot of people out of a job.

Any fool can make make something complex. It’s making something complex simple that’s the genius. And no, there’s no shortcut on this, just like Vlad says.

I remember LG’s marketing campaign here in Aus a few years ago - “Great technology is what you have when you don’t even realise it’s there”.

We’ve still got a looong way to go.