Community Matters

I marvel about genius in almost any area. And in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I am typing this post on a Macbook Pro and that this blog is currently hosted on a Mac Mini. Having said that, I must tip my hat to the genius behind Apple’s marketing and their ability to get grown men (and women) to speculate on the wildest ideas of what Apple might reveal at whatever the next event might be.

This time it’s MacWorld (not sure how long the link will work - they notoriously restructure their site towards the event). And since Steve Jobs has a keynote there, the fans and fan sites are in a frenzy. Once again there will be multiple live blogs from the event, people lined up out the door at 6 in the morning to get in, and more hype and show than one could possibly imagine. Even financial analysts are now joining the speculation game and have been writing for months and months about the allegedly upcoming Mac Phone (which most of them kept calling iPhone even tough Apple doesn’t own that trademark and to add insult to injury, a few weeks ago Cisco’s Linksys launched a product under that name) .

The question is really “why do I want this?” - very often “merged” devices are mediocre in either of their personalities. Cell phones are really hard to get right - and anyone who has tried different phones knows that especially the sound quality is a major obstacle for many startup vendors to get right with cell phones. The Motorola Ming (A1200) that I have used for the last few months is just outstanding in this area. Assuming reasonable signal strength (another one of the areas where it is obviously easy to get things wrong - I couldn’t even get a signal in my house with a Samsung phone I had a while ago) the Ming sounds just outstanding. Even more impressive is the quality of its noise cancellation circuits: I can call people from the car using the wired headset that was included with the phone and most people don’t even realize that I am driving. Add to that good functionality as GPRS modem and you get a pretty convincing package. That’s the baseline that Apple has to compete with on the phone side of the equation (I’m pretty sure they can get the iPod side right… duh). And if it doesn’t measure up there, why spend a lot of money on such a phone compared to the iPod we all already have (well, an amazing number of people do) and the cell phone we are happy with.

I’m curious what they’ll come up with - and any other news that might break next week… the rumored eight core Mac Pros sound like just the image processing machine for me… :-)

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