Appleswitcher Forum post How Many iPods Have You Owned? sheds some light on iPod Turnover. No, not the recipe. I mean how often do Apple devotees buy iPods for themselves (or are gifted them)?

The more data we get, the more accurate the numbers. I’m going to to halt the poll and divide the iPod total # by number of voters to get an iPod/voter count. Right now we have 15 votes, with a bell curve around the 3-4 iPods owned slots.

iPhones and Touches do count.

So if you haven’t registered for the AppleSwitcher forum, register now and vote.

Economies of scale are alive and well with solid state drives, or “SSD”s. Apple is now passing on savings to those who purchase MacBook Air models with 64GB SSD drives. Yesterday: MacBook Air 1.8GHz SSD $3100, Today: $2600.

13-inch : 1.8GHz
	Intel Core 2 Duo processor
	2GB memory
	64GB solid-state drive1
	Built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi2 and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
	Ships: 1-3 business days
	Free Shipping
	$2,598.00

via Ars

Well, maybe not the whole world, but a healthy portion of it that resides exactly within the dimensions that set apart my body from the rest of the universe’s matter.

No, I’m not yawning because I prefer Apple products over Microsoft products. I’m yawning because if someone stops doing something, and that something wasn’t doing anything, what does it matter if they go?

Microsoft has been sucking for almost a decade now. It’s lost its way. One look at its web sites can tell you that. A potpourri of designs, domain names, styles and colors. It shows a company with 0 direction, no Grand Plan. If the eyes are the window to the soul, web sites are a window to a business’ cohesion.

If a look at MS’s wild array of web sites don’t invoke in you a feeling of unbounded, glorious schizophrenia, read the long, sad story of Vista, née Longhorn.

If I was Gates, I would have stepped in and commanded my underlings to develop a unifying company theme, and would have followed that with a web site and PR image unification. Oh what, that’s expensive? C’mon, this is Microsoft we’re talking about. I would have gotten the most important 100 people in the company together and asked things like

1. “Can anyone answer this question in one sentence: what do we do?”
2. “Should we be making hardware?”
3. “Why can’t we crack the search world after 5 years of instense effort?”

Microsoft needs a big fat reinvention like Apple got in 1998, but Gates didn’t do it, and at the twilight of his watch the company’s only successes are 1. holding onto their business clients with MS’s (admittedly very good) business software, and 2. Xbox empire.

So when the world mourns Gates’ departure, I say “Why”?

Fortune.com writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt makes a good case that this scenario is NOT the future, at least not the immediate future.

Let’s back up. What is the table that Elmer-DeWitt is setting? The iPhone:Android=Mac:Windows similie is this: Google’s free, open-source Android phone platform will inevitably crush Apple’s brilliant iPhone platform like Windows crushed Mac in the 1990s, despite the Mac’s far superior interface/experience*.

So will it? Elmer-DeWitt says no, that there are two problems: carrier adoption of the massive changes needed to support Android, and the relatively small Android 3rd-party development community vs. Apple’s large, well-coordinated developer community. Continue reading »

Now that Apple and AT&T have squeaked out of the [iPhone Gen. 1 revenue sharing] deal, what’s holding the two companies together? Certainly some would say that it’s that oft-mentioned exclusivity agreement the companies signed, but I don’t know of one person who actually read the thing and no one really knows if Apple can get out or not.But if I had to take a guess, step one in getting out of its contract with AT&T revolved around the revenue sharing deal. And before you know it, Steve Jobs’ latest blockbuster may be on other carriers.

It may be hard to believe right now, but rest assured that the chances of AT&T and Apple no longer working with each other are greater than you might think. Cnet

This would be a 200-mph blast of fresh air into the iPhone Equation, especially after widespread news that the iPhone Gen. 2 will be locked to AT&T’s network. Having a choice of 2, 3 or more carriers to marry your iPhone to would bring down prices and offer new services. It would be mobile device nirvana.