Next week Apple will have a product event, presumably to announce the next generation of MacBook Pro notebooks. Every year we see these upgrades. The notebooks get faster with more storage and every couple years they look a little different. This time, however, there will be another change — the addition of a new type of peripheral data port called Light Peak that promises, at 10 gigabits-per-second — to be the fastest-yet connection between a Mac and a storage device or even from one Mac to another. And this latter use is key because in addition to Light Peak-equipped MacBook Pros, I expect to see next week a Light Peak Mac Mini. Now that’s interesting.
Light […]
At the Vatican, white smoke coming from a chimney at the Sistine Chapel indicates that a new Pope has been selected by the College of Cardinals. Well despite yesterday’s news of Steve Jobs’s departure again from Apple for medical reasons there is as yet no sign of white smoke in Cupertino where Jobs remains firmly in charge.
Apple has a long history of milking early adopters. Even the crappy products (remember the Newton? the Mac Cube?) would sell a few hundred thousand units to the faithful before those faithful learned the sad truth. But just as they were learning that truth, along would come Steve Jobs (okay, not in the case of the Newton, but generally) gleefully proffering the real fantastic product people had been expecting months before. Then those same early adopters, reenergized, would buy all over again, whether it was an iMac, iPod, MacBook, iPhone, whatever. Why should we think this week’s Verizon iPhone announcement is any different?
Verizon announced its iPhone 4 today, as expected, but it was CDMA, not LTE, and it wasn’t white, which would seem to defy one of my 
My last prediction laid out a pretty aggressive 2011 computing strategy for Apple. But it is just that — a computing strategy — not a media strategy, and Steve Jobs is clearly the most important media mogul on the planet right now, and maybe the most fragile. This latter point is important, because Steve sees himself as having both a unique mission and a frail constitution. He can’t wait to get things done, which is why the next couple years will be probably the most important in Apple’s history.