Apple and the experience

Like I expected, the Apple laptop "keynote" (read "press event") is now viewable on apple.com.

Update: comments on the event: Apparently the MacBook is the best selling Macintosh ever. Pretty cool. And this is a major update for it. (They are keeping the plastic model too, at a lower price.) I think the choice between the MacBook and the Pro is now pretty hard.
Update: this article makes it easier.
"The Energy Saver icon used to be an incandescent light bulb; Apple has replaced it with a compact fluorescent as a part of its quest to reduce the energy consumption of its icons."
Hehehe.

Also if I were one of the many people who use a portable for all their computing and taking it back and forth to work, I'd get the new display for it. Built-in charger, built-in USB 2 hub, built in camera, microphone, and speakers. Dang kewl.

I commented recently how amazing it is that streaming video has gone in a handful of years from an unreliable thumbnail-sized window, to TV-quality. And now I find that I can watch streaming video from Apple... in full HD! Holy mama.
The only weakness, I think, is that if you pause the stream for more than a minute, when you restart it, it takes several seconds to reconnect and start playing. Why doesn't QuickTime just buffer a minute or two so it can start playing immediately?

I used to be highly involved with Macintosh/Apple culture, writing about and checking the news every day, and evangelizing about it. Now not so much. I'm not sure why, it could be 1: personality change for me. 2: the fact that Apple is flying so high that my helps seems superflous. 3: After all these years, I finally have my perfect computer. My Mac Pro is fast enough that I never have to think about it, and also it is quiet, which was certainly not the case up to and including the PowerMac G5. For years, the noise bothered me so much that I used a laptop or iMac for surfing and email, and a PowerMac for image processing and design. Now I can use a single machine for everything.

Also I've lost a lot of the "us versus them" think I used to have, so I don't really give a hoot anymore if anybody uses Mac or Windows or Linux or whatever.
In other words I've not been following developments really, so I'm surprised to hear in this video that Apple, which last time I heard had 5% market share at a generous estimate, now is up to 17%, and a revenue share of 31%! That is an astonishing change. I remember Jobs saying, back when they started the "switcher" campaign a few years ago, "what's a couple of percentage points between friends". Well, it has become more than just a couple.

I remember back in 1995 when I bought my first Mac, a friend drove me out to collect it, and he said he did not think Apple would survive, because they had a too small market share, ignoring the fact that if a brand had to have a majority market share to survive, the world economy could not function.

The fact that I get a little pleasure from being right makes me realize that I still have a little bit of "us versus them" mentality left. Durnit. :-)
But more importantly I want Apple to succeed and survive because I believe they care more about quality and the customer's experience than, say, Microsoft, and so they have a positive influence on the whole market.