Or oh, snap, it’s just Apple now. They dropped the “Computer” part. Does Sir Paul have to sue them all over again now?
One reason posting has been a little light lately is that I’ve been in Cupertino for the past week working on a behind-the-scenes piece about the iPhone launch. It’s here. So I have physically touched an iPhone, and it really is pretty remarkable. The touchscreen — we’re conditioned by years of trackpads and ATMs and kiosks to know that touchscreens suck. This one, oddly, does not. It’s very smart about eliminating inadvertent touches (show us on the trackpad where the bad user touched you…), and the two-finger touching stuff is pretty much a revelation — you can pinch an image smaller, or stretch it bigger…freaky. I think that’s the key technology here that competitors are going to have a tough time knocking off.
So I’m writing this from the MacWorld media lounge, where — randomly — Dave Chappelle is wandering around yacking into his now-obsolete so-called “phone.” Also spotted in the crowd: Sergei Brin and Tim Allen. Now it’s a party.
There are basically three kinds of pieces you can write about Apple. There’s the Apple fanboy piece. Then there’s the backlash piece, which punishes Jobs for his sometimes relentless pitchmanship, and his still-puny share of the PC market share (I don’t know that it’s cracked 6% yet), and the softcore prettiness of OSX, and so on. Then there’s the piece that tries to put both sides in context, and allow for Jobs’s spin, and Apple’s distinctive take on interface design, and try to go from there…I tried to hit the third one. If you’ve got comments, I’m happy to try to answer them here. (Though I’ll be on a plane for much of today…)
