Mainly Macintosh

Okay, the whole family uses Macs now

My brother called last night. Just after I walked in the door after spending Christmas day with my Mom, he rang me up on his new iPhone.

Normally, he is not the type to get excited about gadgets. This time was different. He enthused over the abilities of his iPhone that let him do things he needs to do.

In addition to getting an iPhone this week, he also got a brand new Macintosh computer. This one, he informed me, his wife will be sharing with him.

He has already bought the Parallels software that will let him install MS-Windows on his Mac.

I got two other emails about the Macintosh today.

One was from a college days friend of mine. He sent me an article that decried the failure of Microsoft Vista to catch on with the IBM PC clone owners out there currently running Windows XP and older stuff.

The part of the article he highlighted was the ironic fact that the fastest notebook for running Windows Vista on is ...the Apple MacBook Pro. Apparently, Apple is not just outdoing the old school PC companies in the software area - but in some crucial hardware areas too.

My uncle sent me a couple emails with questions about Mac OS X - particularly the new Leopard version that just came out a couple of months ago.

He wants to make sure that it will be able to understand documents that come from MS-Windows PCs a lot better than his Mac OS 9 computer. Fortunately, the answer to that was yes.

One year ago, another old friend of mine told me how the stock price of Apple was going to plummet.

He also claimed that sales of iTunes music had dropped off - which was untrue. His basis for claiming it was a pseudo-fact conjured up by a research firm that asked a paltry few hundred people if they were buying more or less music from iTunes store.

They obviously asked the wrong people because they were not representative of what millions of iTunes customers were doing. They were buying more music than ever and weeks later Steve Jobs announced contrary to the bunk conclusion of that survey, it was a record quarter for iTunes.

His next pronouncement was that the iPhone would bomb. Apple had no clue how to build a phone good enough for people to buy, supposedly.

All of his assertions were wrong - and my family has proven that. Mom ignored his advice and made more money with Apple stock - and she bought her first iMac ever. My brother ignored his advice and got a Mac, and an iPhone - which he loves.

So, despite the the claims of those clutching a Zune in one hand and a bunch of anti-virus utilities in the other hand - 2007 was a record year for Apple. Apple excelled in all the areas that they would supposedly fail miserably in this year.

I am left with just one question.

Which is a bigger failure: the Zune that was supposed to let people share their music but frequently did not - or the anti-virus software that was supposed to keep all the viruses and spyware off PCs but somehow did not?

To a lot of families this holiday season - the answer to that question is moot. It does not matter to them anymore. They have escaped to someplace better.

Labels: apple, iphone, macintosh, vista, zune

posted by John Collins @ 8:33 PM