Summing my thoughts up and dumping them as quickly as possible:
- Snow Leopard. Why do I always hate Apple’s product names, then warm to them eventually? It’ll have to grow on me. Looks relatively boring. Apple ran out of ideas – lack of innovation.
- iPhone 3G – nice.
- iPhone 2.0 software – looks solid. Nothing earth-shattering that wasn’t really expected. $9.99 + UK VAT + mild extortion will be leaving my bank account soon.
- Mobile Me – reserve judgement. I’d like to give it a try. Not sure I need yet another email address. Probably too expensive.
Any other thoughts? Accepted in brain-dump format or more eloquent versions. 🙂
Apple’s such a powerful brand, so different rules might apply, but I am sceptical about the $99 price for the Mobile Me. Users don’t now expect to pay for email/calendar and we’re getting very close to an effective file storage solution for free as well. The premium models of Yahoo and Microsoft’s webmail products have, I suspect, broken down in popularity, and even those few services for which users are prepared to pay offer a comprehensive free option as well (cf Flickr). Nevertheless, Apple’s brand may just be enough to get lemmings to sign up anyway, and they don’t need to get a very big fraction of Gmail’s user numbers to be pulling in vast revenue with $99/year. And it helps that the demo looked like a compelling product.