360angles

The Unnofficial Apple Weblog just launched a redesign today. They’re one of the longest running Mac blogs and have managed to turn themselves into more than just another mac fan site over the years. I like the new look, it finally mercy-kills their dated blue and green logo that I’ve always kind of wished didn’t exist. The new format is easy to use and read, but retains a lot of the flavor of the old site. Good stuff.

One of the sure things coming tomorrow at Apple’s “Let’s Rock” special event is iTunes 8. This is supposed to be a true point release, not a bug fix, but a new iTunes program.

The rumor mill is swirling with mentions of the tiered pricing system the music biz is salivating over and of new Apple iPod hardware with which to utilize the stores wares. But now something concrete: it is 99.9% certain that Magnetosphere is the new iTunes visualizer. And it’s miles better than the current one.

This is cringe inducing. It’s the first salvo being fired back at Apple’s Get a Mac campaign with Justin Long and the superb John Hodgeman.

This is weak tea. Microsoft is going to need a lot more than esoteric comedy and a act who used to be great to shake off the branding corner that they’ve been painted into.

On the other hand, their Mojave Experiment TV Spots are brilliant; just don’t actually go to MojaveExperiment.com it’s an almost an unusable Silverlight GUI disaster, but that’s another blog post. They can’t beat Apple on funny, or slick production, so all they’ve got is their product. Fortunately for them, Vista has a bad name that no piece of software, no matter how terrible, could actually live up to. It’s a case where not living up to the hype is a good thing. They know this and played off it well, this is where they should concentrate. This Seinfeld stuff is just Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot with an insanely expensive bullet.

Someone got canned over this for sure. Bloomberg news sent a preliminary obituary of Steve Jobs out over their news wire yesterday. It was quickly retracted, but raised more than a few eyebrows, considering the pancreatic cancer rumors that have been swirling around the Apple icon lately. Gawker has the full obit, if you care to parse.

Reuters reports that Orange (a European wireless service provider) is padding a lukewarm Polish iPhone reception by paying actors to “line-up” outside 20 stores to “buy” the Apple iPhone. Ah, there’s nothing like alienating your core customers to possibly generate some new ones. Hey, I’ve got an idea, how about you make your current product/service so amazing that you core customers can’t help but recruit new ones for you?

UPDATE 8/28/08: Orange denies it. The outside hires aren’t to stand in line, “Their aim is to welcome people to the Orange shop, share in their excitement and give information about Orange tariffs,” a spokeswoman told Ad Age.

Now, I’m a admitted Apple fanboy, and I’m all for artistic license. But when the thing you’re promoting is speed itself, you might want to show things in real time…

Shady advertising aside, they’re obviously doing something very right…

Steve Jobs would say, “BOOM.” Apple (AAPL) has eclipsed Google (GOOG) in market value. Apple’s current market cap: $159.37 billion. Google’s: $157.56 billion.

This is the music video for Again and Again by The Bird and The Bee. The entire video takes place on the desktop of a Mac running OS X Leopard. It was created by Dennis Liu. That link seems to be his portfolio site, but this video is not listed amongst his work. (It should be showcased, as far as I’m concerned. And Apple should send him a fat check.)

Wait for the KILLER call to action at the end, it’s perfect.