Fool me once, shame on you…
Apple has a long history of milking early adopters. Even the crappy products (remember the Newton? the Mac Cube?) would sell a few hundred thousand units to the faithful before those faithful learned the sad truth. But just as they were learning that truth, along would come Steve Jobs (okay, not in the case of the Newton, but generally) gleefully proffering the real fantastic product people had been expecting months before. Then those same early adopters, reenergized, would buy all over again, whether it was an iMac, iPod, MacBook, iPhone, whatever. Why should we think this week’s Verizon iPhone announcement is any different?
Where’s the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network? Where’s surfing while talking? Where’s the […]
Verizon announced its iPhone 4 today, as expected, but it was CDMA, not LTE, and it wasn’t white, which would seem to defy one of my 
All the top movies are appearing in 3D versions and the Consumer Electronics Show last week was full of new 3D TV’s. Why isn’t anybody buying them? We already bought our big-screen TV’s, thanks.
My last prediction laid out a pretty aggressive 2011 computing strategy for Apple. But it is just that — a computing strategy — not a media strategy, and Steve Jobs is clearly the most important media mogul on the planet right now, and maybe the most fragile. This latter point is important, because Steve sees himself as having both a unique mission and a frail constitution. He can’t wait to get things done, which is why the next couple years will be probably the most important in Apple’s history.
If you put together my 2011 predictions so far they create a world view of tech culture and business as I see it for the coming year. Each prediction builds on the others until we get to these last two, which present a couple boffo conclusions, the big question being “What does Apple need with a 500,000 (soon to be one million) square foot data center in rural North Carolina?”