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Without Steve Jobs, is Apple Sony?

Updated at 5:20 a.m. PDT with Phil Schiller keynote info.

When it was first announced that Steve Jobs was taking a leave of absence I was interviewed for an ABC affiliate about the prospects of Apple without Jobs. What would happen? Would he be missed? Was Apple vulnerable?

Sadly, I can't say that I came up with any earth-shattering sound bites. I said Apple would be fine in the short run; it had a roster full of talented executives, including a rock-star head designer (Jonathan Ive), and that the company's product road map was planned out into the future--presumably with Jobs' stamp of approval.

That said, no one could replace Steve Jobs, pitcher extraordinaire, a Sandy Koufax on the marketing mound, if there ever was one.

The fact is, no one can create a reality distortion field like Jobs. And ultimately, I said, that's what Apple would miss most, especially after Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller, hadn't done much to inspire the faithful with his ho-hum keynote speech at MacWorld 2009.

However, little did I know that Jobs' absence would be felt so acutely in the release of the company's latest products, though I probably wouldn't categorize the new Mac Mini, updated iMacs, and third-generation iPod Shuffle as premium releases for Apple.

While the new releases may be a step up from Apple TV, which just hasn't been able to find a broad audience, they're not the iPod Nano or a new MacBook or iPhone OS 3.0. But what's a little disconcerting is how the products, particularly the Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle, landed with a bit a thud. Sure, they got a ton of publicity--and publicity is good--but a lot of it ranged from neutral to negative.

… Read more

Lenovo teases 'Pocket Yoga' mini laptop

Update: Lenovo says there's no actual product behind these mockups, which were of an old concept piece and just recently published on flickr.

We've seen a handful of "leaked" photos recently of a tiny laptop prototype from Lenovo. Looking suspiciously like Sony's Vaio P series, the system has an extremely wide screen, flat edge-to-edge keys, and looks to be similar in size--about the same footprint as a standard business envelope.

Those fuzzy photos have been replaced by some beauty shots on Lenovo's Flickr stream.

The device, called the Pocket Yoga, features a tablet screen … Read more

Ludicrously priced laptops: Apple, HP, Sony

Some laptops, especially ultraportables, brazenly push the envelope on pricing. In the age of the ultra-cheap Netbook, are they really worth the $2,000 to $3,000 price tag? I've listed three egregious offenders and two that fall into the less-scandalous-but-still-snooty pricing category.

Let's start with the Hewlett-Packard Voodoo Envy 133, probably the most brazenly overpriced of the batch because it will still set you back as much as $2,700 despite the fact that it hasn't been updated in almost eight months and, accordingly, comes with obsolete hardware.

The 13-inch ultra-slim Voodoo Envy 133 model NV4050NA … Read more