Mircea Baldean

A new Forrester report divides the U.S. online population into six groups according to their social participation on the Web:

• Creators - those who blog, publish web sites, upload videos, or participate in other content creation activities - 21 percent own Macs, while only 12 percent own Dell computers;
• Spectators - they read blogs, watch videos, and listen to podcasts - 55 percent own Macs;
• The majority of Inactives - they don’t participate online - 55 percent own Dells.

Social Participation on the Web:

Source: Forrester. Via: Macworld.

I totally believe that UBS Investment Research is right! Touch screen technology has been around for a while, tablet PCs are becoming more and more popular, self check-out terminals are spawning, Axiotron’s ModBook is using a stylus. Remember, Steve Jobs doesn’t like the stylus, so multi-touch technology can be just one step away from the iPhone to iPods or Macs. Is it more user friendly? We might need to redefine notions like “right-click”, “control-click”…

Interesting “Thoughts on Music” by Steve Jobs:

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full.  This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats.  It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future.  And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

Would be interesting to find out a music/podcast/video/photo split ratio on an average iPod. I bet Apple has the figures :)

I was just looking through the log files today: just try this search “mac no vista“. You can even try “I’m Feeling Lucky” option. Or this: ipod prices around the world.

I take a look at my blog’s stats, especially platforms: 31.25% Mac users! Yey!

No Vista for me! Not a for a while at least… That’s because I recently switched to Mac and I love it so far! Thanks to Jenn, who was bugging me for the last year, I started to do my homework and got into the Mac spirit. Got a copy of David Pogue’s Mac OS X Tiger: The Missing Manual just to get an overview and features of OS X. If you have a Linux background, you’ll love how Apple integrated it’s super-cool GUI with the robustness of Linux. Everything is so easy to learn and discover.

The second generation of MacBookPros, running on Intel Duo Core 2 is awesome, pretty fast even when rendering big images in PhotoShop. You can even run Windows with Parallels on Intel based Macs, but I don’t see a reason to install it on a such a sleek machine.

More about my experience on Macs to come shortly, on a dedicated new blog. Yes, I think it’s worth it.

Way to go, Apple!
Yours new Mac junkie.