I wish Apple and MS would put me out of my mysery and show the Courier and iSlate or whatever they intend to be called.

The best one wins my custom!

Those HP machines are nice. I liked that convertible notepad. The first thing I heard about it was “Why is it so expensive?” Well, good luck, HP. It's going to be a hard sell to the cheapsters, no matter how good it is.

Dismissing me as an Apple fan doesn't help. I have a favorable opinion of Apple because they contributed very much to making my I-T consultant charges over the past decade come out at an even zero dollars, even as my colleagues who use Windows paid tens of thousands of dollars to “enjoy” a kind of virus safari. Because I do freelance work, I see what I'm missing all the time, I see downed Windows boxes and frustrated users running archaic software that cannot even survive on the Internet. It's so bad that I now take my own 1.3 kilo Mac to jobs and run circles around everybody there and I'm asked back again and again because my employers like my high productivity. So I'm not only saving money from reduced I-T costs, I'm making money from improved productivity compared to Windows users. So the idea that people with a favorable opinion of Apple are fanatics is asinine. It's the people who continue to use what doesn't work that are the fanatics. (I'm looking in the general direction of the 80% of Windows users who are still on XP.)

The iPhone was Apple's most pre-announced product ever, announced in January 2007 and not shipping until June 2007, yet the big multinational where I'm consulting right now did not start supporting it until late 2008. And even then, the reason they started doing that was because so many users had just brought in their own iPhones and stopped using their company-issued Blackberry devices.

Business I-T is totally reactive, not proactive. Business is always way, way behind consumers. This is true even in PC's. The Mac came out in 1984 and Bill Gates himself has said that business resisted the GUI until 10 years later. WordPerfect, with all of its key commands and non-WYSIWYG was the business standard in 1992, 7 years after WYSIWYG Word on the Mac.

It's only if you focus solely on what Microsoft is putting out (always 10 plus years behind) and ignore the rest of the industry that you think business I-T is engaged in any planning for the future. What they are actually doing in many, many cases is planning how they will navigate Microsoft's licensing minefield and massive technical failures. There are very few business I-T people actively looking for and deploying actual solutions.

So whatever Apple releases this year is not going to be “business-ready” (LOL) for a few years no matter what. Pre-announcing 6 months earlier has no relevance.