The notion of a casual computer (as my colleague Mark Rolston described the iPad to the Wall Street Journal) is actually not a new one. Companies of all shapes and sizes have been trying to figure it out for quite a long time (including Steve Jobs and Apple...since 1983).
The launch of the iPad yesterday put an exclamation mark on an increasingly obvious point: Apple is the company that has captured the cultural zeitgeist. The massive hype leading up to the event - apparently achieved in a groundswell with very little effort on Apple's part - shows that they really are the "It" company right now.
Some thoughts on the challenges faced by the three cross-platform OS makers -- Apple, Google and Microsoft -- on the disruption to their businesses caused by Netbooks.
I just purchased an upgrade to Apago’s excellent PDF Shrink app, which does the best job I’ve found of any app for compressing PDFs. Going the Print to PDF route in OS X is super convenient but with image-heavy files (say PPTs) it creates very bloaty files due to how it treats images. PDF Shrink cuts them down to size much better than the Compress PDF function in Preview, retaining image quality far better.
An article in the New York Times says customers are being more attracted to "simple" products:
And, as it turns out, the buyers of consumer electronics could very well have been a leading economic indicator. Over the last year, they chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.
But the article conflates two different definitions of "simple"
iTunes 8, announced yesterday, introduces a couple of things which point toward a future where Apple branches out beyond its pay-as-you-go buying model for media. Are these a harbinger of new buying options that will appear in iTunes 9?
