Apple tales have happy endings.
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Apple’s fix
I blew my Mac power adapter in London. Was sitting under a plasma display at OPA, hooked into one of the only power strips there (London has too few plugs!), trying to get some juice and to blog and I heard a pfffft on the screen and suddenly saw that my power was gone. It so happens that I had an Igo power adapter with me (because I thought I might need it on the plane — belt, suspenders) and so I was OK to operate my Mac, but nothing was charging my batteries. Uh-oh. I whined about this to a few folks and they all wondered whether we were headed into Dell Hell, The Sequel.
Nope. I made an appointment at the Apple Genius Bar from London and went this afternoon. There was a bit of a wait on a Saturday (thanks in great measure to an old lady with a six-year-old Mac ahead of me who stretched a 5-minute question into a 40-minute symphony of repetition), but I had no on-hold Muzak and talked to a nice guy, face-to-face. He replaced my power adapter and showed me how to reset the power management unit and didn’t require me to go through a bit of bureacracy and now all is well.
Take that, Dell.
Nya, nya, nya
Apple is now worth more than Dell.
Dell makes a lot more computers. But they are worth a lot less.
Apple makes better computers. And that is worth much more. Even Wall Street figured that out. MacDailyNews reports [via my son]:
On October 6, 1997, in response to the question of what he’d do if he was in charge of Apple Computer, Dell founder and then CEO Michael Dell stood before a crowd of several thousand IT executives and answered flippantly, “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
A little more than a month later, on November 10, 1997, new Apple iCEO Steve Jobs responded, speaking in front of an image of Michael Dell’s bulls-eye covered face, “We’re coming after you, you’re in our sights.”
Today, after a little more than eight years of hard work, Apple Computer, Inc. passed Dell, Inc. in market value. That’s right, at market close Apple Computer ($72,132,428,843) is now worth more than Dell ($71,970,702,760).
I told you to sell.
For fellow Apple cultists
Engadget is giving the blow-by-blow of Steve Jobs keynote. Fun iPod statporn: They’ve sold over 42 million iPods, over 850 million songs, over 8 million videos.
I was hoping the first Intel box would be a laptop. It’s the iMac:
1:12 PM – “So … today we are gonna roll out the first Mac with an Intel processor.”
1:13 PM – “Without any more fanfare, it is the iMac” It looks the same as it does now….
1:14 PM – “We’re going to offer it in the same sizes, 17 and 20-inch. We’re going to offer it in the same award winning design. We’re going to offer it with the same features. We’re going to offer it for the same prices. So what’s different?”
1:14 PM – “We are building in … the new Intel Core Duo. Each of these processors is faster than the G5, and there’s two of ’em.” …
1:17 PM – “Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.2 is running entirely natively – not just the operating system but all the applications.” He’s been using it for the entire demo all morning, natch….
1:26 PM – “They are shipping today. We are going to be transitioning our entire product line this year.” This is huge.
1:28 PM – “We made an ad just to let people know what we’re doing, and I’d like to premiere it for you now.” Ad voiceover: “The Intel chip. For years it’s been trapped inside ordinary PCs. Doomed to performing dull little tasks.” …
Yeah, laptops, too! Details at Engadget.
: Later: My son’s reactions.
OD
I’ll be on CNN twice Sunday: on Reliable Sources at 10a and On the Story at 1p (a rerun from Saturday night). Subject: West Virginia.
I did my first blogcast with CNN, this time using Apple’s iChat and iSight (with my son’s invaluable assistance). When I used to do these with the late Connected show on MSNBC, we had to use Microsoft Messenger (of course). Apple’s solutions work far better: higher quality images and sound and easier to set up (except for those pesky router ports).
