I cannot avoid commenting on the phenomenon of Apple customer loyalty. Apple fans don’t like to hear anything negative about Apple. Nothing at all. I had more feedback on the fact that I described the Apple Newton as a failed product than I have had on just about anything else recently – all of it negative.

Well to be honest, the Newton was a product failure, even if it was an innovative idea that would eventually be made into a popular consumer product by Palm. Apple never made the idea work. But it did make the idea of elegant PC design work and others are now copying it. There are now PC models with plexiglass and miniature frames like small hi-fis complete with added  liquid crystal display.

One company, Shuttle Inc, is having genuine success with toaster-sized models in various colours, selling about 50,000 units a month – which amounts to half the company’s revenues. There is even a PC the size of a Walkman CD player (the EZgo from Atoz Technology) ideal for the in-car PC user I suppose. Presumably Dell will dive into this consumer oriented market, it already has the consumer bug, with plans to produce flat-screen televisions and projectors for home theatres.

I stand corrected on the Apple BlueTooth keyboard and mouse. Microsoft had already brought such products to market. Apple claims superiority in having a longer range of usage (30 feet – but I’ll need a hell of a big screen if I use it at that distance) and encrypted traffic. Also inaccurate (bad week, last week) was my reporting of the Eolas v Microsoft case, in that the patent concerned related to running applications locally through the browser. However the newspapers got that wrong too.