As I mentioned absolutely no one in my post, there was no "personal attack" and I didn't call anyone "names".

A personal attack would look more like this, 'up yours Nancy!'

In the future if you have some issue with me then have the sack to address it honestly instead of making up things and falsely attributing them to me.

Or get this version and the next version in 6 months. Everyone in my family uses my hand me down computers.

As my wife says, you do what you have to do to look sexy, be that eat salads or forgo a built-in optical drive.

Then again, the Cube was kind of nice looking, in that... clear, cubical kind of way.

You mean the ones that didn't melt or catch fire from a lack of proper cooling, right?

^

And then they made the iPod and that all changed.

And I love how Crave compares the Air to the Cube, and its chances.

A mere 4 million iPhones is hardly non-niche.

Ariandb actually referred to the ipod, not the iphone. And, Apple has sold 119 million iPods worldwide as of October 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod

My bad!
Agreed!

Well, even niche-market companies need a mass-market product. To like, expand their niche. I guess.

But then the iPod was supposed to be a niche market product (for music lovers who have like 4000 songs) but it happened to be the only product in its freaking category, which then resulted in people equating MP3 music with the iPod.

But their computers are DEFINITELY a niche product.

Photos of an unboxing in Japan. It appears to be less than 1/2 the size of the Sony SZ (thickness), comparison 2, comparison 3.

What is that, a little fold out door for the expansion ports? Is that on the bottom? How does that work in real life if it's on the bottom?

-David

From what I remember, the iPod was never the first or only MP3 player, not even the first hard drive-based iPod. It's just the only one that was any kind of easy to use at the time. Possibly the iPod nano which ultimately became the most popular model was the first to have largish amounts of flash memory instead of a hard drive, in a unit with a bright color screen.

What made the iPod popular originally is that every other interface sucked. Now that it dominates, it keeps a finely cultivated and marketed image, sure. Some might say that other products have caught up, I don't really know not having spent a lot of time using the latest ones. (I've used a couple year old Sandisk that definitely doesn't measure up.) But it doesn't matter so far because for the moment the iPod is still perceived as it, and the only people who don't want one seem to be those that care about a certain specific feature over usability and/or style (the same reason someone would not choose a Mac computer) or those who want to be anti-establishment (the *opposite* reason vs the computer business).

Those photos are a bit deceptive. The SZ in the photos is the basic, all-plastic SZ w/non-LED display.

Mine [and many others] is the Premium Carbon fiber version with the LED screen. The SZ carbon fiber LED screen is half as thick as the standard screen in that photo and the rest of the case is a bit thinner too, though there is no question that the Air is, overall, thinner than the SZ.