I have moved the site to my own domain at marks.dk, so feel free to drop by and read all you can…

Mark.

Everytime Apple launches a new gadget, they tend to follow the Blue Ocean Strategy, as they don’t make a new product and just let it out in the Red Sea of bloody competition – they re-invent the product by taking two different markets and merge them in one product (you might say there’s three markets here; music players, phones and computers). They make the competitors irrelevant, and this article shows it very well.

Oh, and I love that Steve is like a child in so many ways… Stubborn as hell and full of excitement over the new product that he’s about to show to someone from outside the development team.

UPDATE: NY Times tries the phone as well

[links via TUAW]

There are a few negative sides, though…

Why the €&%# is it bundled with Cingular for two whole years? (I feel sorry for you americans, being hooked like that)
Why don’t they release it in Europe before Christmas 2007 (did I miss something or did we just celebrate Christmas – it’s a year until next time!)?
Only 2MP camera – 5 years ahead of everybody else, you say?
500 or 600 bucks?! When it comes to Denmark, you can put 25% on top of that (thank you, VAT), so as long as I’m nothing more than a student, I can forget all about it…

That being said – I love the damn thing! It seems elegant, yet intuitive and practical, and everything about it screams “Buy me!”. I’m just worried that it will force the iPod to not be updated, as Apple (now without the “Computer”-name attached to it) would want people to buy the phone, but then again; the “high-end” iPod wouldn’t be updated a whole year for europeans and asians (shipping in Asia in early 2008), and that seems very unlikely. Or at least, I hope so, because a widescreen iPod without the phone-abilities (but still featuring OS X!) would be amazing anyway.

And then the Apple TV-box…

It seems awefully nice, though the 720-HD-standard is quite outdated, as far as I understand from reading Schobleizer, so nothing huge and interesting. As always, the connection to Apple’s other products is great, and the “stream-trailers-from-Apple-Store”-feature is kinda sweet. The 40 GB Hard Disk is useless (I just upgraded my MacBook to 160GB, and that is not enough if I wanted to import my DVDs), so they fitted it with the “stream-from-other-computers”-feature, and this makes it all worth. This is why I could even consider buying it, because as long as they don’t sell TV Shows and Movies in my Danish iTunes Store, I couldn’t care less about the $9,99-tag…

So, all in all I think they are nifty products that I would definately try, but there are still some hassles that needs to be removed (the price and the bundling in regards to the iPhone, and the fact that I can’t buy any videos in the Danish iTunes Store).

Oh, and I still hope to blog a lot more. Just gotta find some nice software to use, so I don’t have to jump to wordpress.com every time I want to post…

I know one thing; I’m not taking this one back to the store. First of all, I can’t take it back, since it was a gift for my father from an artist (Lasse Drevsholt) who rented a room at my fathers’ old appartment, and second of all; I really don’t want to give up such a painting!

The year lacks to the end as well, and what a year it has been… A new full-time job in May (which I still have, but as a part-time job), the best summer in years (a lot of partying with friends and just enjoying life), a new everyday life at Copenhagen Business School studying Information Management, a new place to live and after a year of having nobody else to worry about than myself, suddenly another person needs my attention and care; and I am there to give it. It couldn’t be any better.

Next year will be just as exciting as well; hopefully I can find myself a new job that is a bit more relevant to the study than the one I have as of now, and I believe my choice of study will prove to be even more perfect than assumed at first. I have wanted to study Information Management since I heard about it a year ago, but every day I find it more and more interesting, so completing the first year of the study will hopefully end in satisfaction and joy.

Regarding this blog, I hope to write more often in the new year, but it is difficult to get it all done, when you borrow your neighbour’s wireless 4 kb/s connection. This is also something that needs to be fixed over the next couple of weeks. One can’t be a part of the information highway when using such a slow connection, so I’m looking forward to a change of this.

So, happy holidays, take care of your fingers New Year’s Eve and see you all in 2007.

Maybe I should spend some time learning how to write this kind of stuff, instead of just messing around with non-validatable (can you call it that?) HTML-sites?

This is a transcript of what could be the conversation between Apple and Universal… No matter how funny it might seem at first, this is how it’s gonna be when Jobs rolls up his sleeve and start talking busines!