Notes from ‘The Fringe’: New Apple iCandy dazzles
Good-bye Office 2004, hello iWork ‘08. And welcome new iMacs and .Mac boost — all well worth skipping LinuxWorld Expo for, writes Tom Yager. During an unprecedented Q&A session following Apple’s Town Hall meeting Aug. 7, no less than Steve Jobs gave me a new nickname: “The Fringe.” He was referring to journalists who solidly panned the iPhone in the first round of high-profile reviews. To my knowledge, membership in that fringe is limited to one. I wear that moniker proudly, remembering the not-too-distant days when Apple, too, was dismissed as a fringe player and when Jobs himself was written off by the financial media for investing in some crazy idea, considered by pundits inside the sparsely populated fringe as the enemy of profit and market share — namely, innovation. Apart from habitually being at odds with conventional wisdom, I share one other trait with Jobs: Far more often than not, when everybody else writes me off as an idiot, I turn out to be right. It’s just a matter of patience. It’s OK with me that by the time the rest of the world catches up to my way of thinking, they’ve forgotten who told the truth in the… READ MORE