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Innovation

Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Tuesday 7/06/2005Ah yes, Apple. I imagine that if Steve Jobs hears the name Adam Osborne one more time, he’ll invent the rectally-installed iPod and appoint the first beta tester in one swift move.
Written by Rupert Goodwins, Contributor

Tuesday 7/06/2005

Ah yes, Apple. I imagine that if Steve Jobs hears the name Adam Osborne one more time, he’ll invent the rectally-installed iPod and appoint the first beta tester in one swift move. But there’s still no clear answer to the question why I or anyone else should buy an Apple now instead of in a year’s time -- well, except that OS X is so much nicer than Windows or Linux.

I wonder if Microsoft is ever going to make a nice operating system? If you were starting from scratch and designing a domestic OS, you might come up with OS X – but you’d never come up with Windows XP. Intel, which has failed miserably to win any of the new world of gaming consoles and is just one of many smartphone/PDA chip contenders, must be very relieved that it’s got an ally in the home that isn’t Microsoft -- who, you never know, might now be thinking of a PowerPC version of Windows.

Part of me hopes that Apple does have a rough year -- not because I want the company to do badly, but because it might make it and its PRs want to talk to the press again in anything other than Imperial Dictat mode. At the moment, if you’re favoured in court you get the goodies and the info; if you’re not, you get ignored. There are elements of that in the way most companies handle their press relationships, of course, but nobody manages to encapsulate the spirit of Louis XIV in quite the same way as those whacky Appleoids.

Later that evening, I pop along to the Orange fiction prize awards bash. I might have missed Bono in Monaco, but I bagged Kate Adie (got a photo of her feet), Sandi Toksvig, Jenni Murray and other members of the gynocracy. I end the night ganging up with cartoonist Martin Rowson against the achingly glossy yet curiously empty proprietor of an achingly glossy yet curiously empty lifestyle/literary London magazine. We have a drunken philosophical rant about the nature of identity and responsibility in a corporate, technological world while the magazine chap tries to get Rowson to agree to do some cartoons for him, but can’t quite work out how to spell his name. By the end of the evening, I’m not quite sure how to spell mine.

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