Patrick's Soapbox

Referring to this article on MacWorld. This UK site usually has quality coverage, but in this coverage - based on an article over at eweek, quotes ye ol' expert Rob Enderle. He's many a time proven to be unreliable in his comments, and I personally wouldn't trust a word he said.

However my real beef here is not so much with Enderle. It's with ZiffDavis' Jeff Louderback.

Louderback argues that "Apple's time in the PC market has come and gone," suggesting that Apple should now focus its attention on the consumer electronics market.

...

Louderback gives a number of examples of where he thinks Apple should switch its focus, suggesting: "Apple has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dominate the emerging convergence world. But its legacy operations are dragging it down."

Apple should stop making iBooks and instead look at bring video to the iPod: "Why does the iPod remain an audio platform? Because Apple's too busy refreshing the iBooks to embrace this emerging category," Louderback says.

And he suggests that Apple should look at developing a "NewtPhone" because: "There will be 2 billion intelligent phones sold over the next few years. With Apple's device, form factor and OS brilliance, they could dominate here too."

Is this guy on drugs? Is really under the impression that Apple should drop one of their popular lines (I er, know as many people with iBook's as iPod's, not necessarily with both...) to focus on a device that is in an "emerging category" (one I personally don't see as actually taking off in the way the MP3 player has).

The reason I say this is simple - the MP3 player had precedent. That being the portable radio, walkman, the discman, the minidisc etc. Portable music players were, and have been popular for reasonable amount of time. Portable video players have not seen anywhere near this level of popularity. How many people do you know that have a portable music player? Next, think of how many have a portable video (eg. portable tv, portable dvd player w/ screen or otherwise). I just can't see it happening anytime soon.

And a "NewtPhone"? Interesting, but again I don't see it actually fitting into Apple.

Oh well.