A plethora of Mac and iPod articles

Posted: Friday, April 01, 2005 | |

For this blog I'm going to share a couple of article from various websites that talks about the Mac and iPod.

Living Happily with a PC and a Mac Mini

Mac religion reflects brand mysticism

Thinking broadly brings Apple brand success

An Apple a day

iPod: where will it stop

Apple earns its stripes

Happily ever after...?
The article Living Happily with a PC and a Mac Mini from PC World is written by Tracey Capen. Ms. Capen recounts her experience with using the Mac mini together with her Windows PC desktop. The two things she had a problem with are not related directly to the Mac mini; rather to the two peripherals she was using with the Mac mini: the Belkin KVM switch and a external Plextor DVD writer. But all in all she is quite satisfied on the Windows PC desktop and Mac mini marriage.

...keeps the viruses and malware away.
PC World New Zealand's Matt Cooney in the meantime tried an all-Apple setup for three weeks. In his column An Apple a day the writer used Apple products in a sea of Windows PCs. He was going to do war against the Windows army. In his arsenal were: a 20-inch iMac with Superdrive, an iBook, an Airport Extreme, an iSight and an iPod.

And according to Mr. Cooney, the set-up passed with flying colors but cautioned readers that Apple computers are as configurable as a Wintel computer. But all in all he had high praises for Apple and was not looking forward to going back to his previous set-up.

Apple branding phenomena
Macworld's Thinking broadly brings Apple brand success refers to an article in BusinessWeek, "Branding: Five New Lessons.

"Apple gained the lead nevertheless with a combination of great product design and marketing brains."

But, the report goes on to ask: "Why were consumers willing to accept a computer maker as a consumer-electronics company?" It concludes that it was "because Apple made its brand stand not for desktop computing but for imagination and fun."

The religion of Apple
From Macworld again, Mac religion reflects brand mysticism looks at how some brands have become quasi-religious according to the report which Macworld based its article on. The cult of consumerism says:
Everything that is crucial to religion - shared values and beliefs, community interactions, storytelling, and an acceptance of the supernatural - can also be found in the worship by consumers of brands.
So is Apple a religion? If by religion you mean the stupid things that are involved in Catholic or in Islam? No.

The tiger will roar
If you want to invest in a high tech stock that will be able to stand out this year, what should it be? Apple. Well, that's according to CNN Money. The article attributes the success of Apple's stock to the iPod. But the writer is going out on a limb by saying that the new Mac OS, Tiger, will also help in raising Apple's stock value even higher.
"Apple isn't cheap but it's not insanely expensive. It's cheaper than many Internet stocks and it's growing as fast, if not faster than companies like Google, Yahoo! and eBay."
It keeps going and going...
And finally, in iPod: where will it stop, the article recounts iPod's success from iPod surpassing Creative in the hard disk drive MP3 player market to the success of the iTunes Music Store. It now begs to question: what's in store for the iPod in the future. Will Steve Jobs be able to further innovate the product that has made Apple shine ever brighter? Stay tuned.

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