YES, I heard about the suit filed by Cisco yesterday over the iPhone name. And I think you illustrate my point exactly: Apple Inc, in my opinion, is in danger of losing its core identity as a quality niche market computer manufacturer as to build a global empire of mobile media. Dangerous because, just as you said, the iPod and its ilk are “toys” – not as serious a machine as you, a core customer, as compared to your iMac. Dangerous waters, in my opinion, if you are an investor or a Macophile.

R

I tend to agree and was hoping that the keynote speech would be more about something note-worthy like some great improvement in OS X 10.5

To me, Apple Computers Inc. IS the Mac OS, not the iEverything nor the funky looking sleek computer cases.

And even though the best thing to come out of Apple is really a product of NeXT engineers (the Unix based OS X) that is still what Apple is about.

My home computer is a re-built non-firewire second generation orange i-Mac that was discarded by a previous employer and upgraded with scavanged parts so that now it’s running OS X 10.4 on harware that Apple says won’t even load it!

So yes, I think OS X is great but all this iPod iPhone stuff… that’s just toys, there’s nothing really noteworthy there.

By the way, isn’t iPhone a trademark of Cisco?
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/mobile-phones/the-iphone-arrives-via-cisco.asp

Francesca