The Nutty Things Going On In Our Mac World.

It’s been just two years. Two years since Apple launched a $500 Mac, the Mac mini. Who would have figured that out?

Since then, smallere iPods, cooler iMacs, faster MacPros, faster MacBooks, bigger market share, Intel chips.

This whole Mac world is going nutty. I don’t know why, but the past 24 months or so have made it wildly entertaining.

For example, go back just two years. Who would have predicted Apple’s current position in the market place? Record sales and profits.

Growing Mac market share. A switch to Intel chips. A commanding position in online music sales and portable music players.

That’s the retrospective view. How about what’s going on today?

Mac world news headlines these days are remarkable. There’s the iPhone, already being poked on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It’s not even a product yet, but there are specifications floating around.

Flash drive, hard drive, dual batteries, iTunes built-in, iSight built-in.

When was the last time Apple pre-announced a product? So far as I know it was the original OS X about six or seven years ago, then iTV in August. We still don’t know much about what iTV does but we want one, right?

Microsoft is crowing about their projections to sell one million Zunes by June 2007. In contrast, it’s Apple who sells about one million iPods every five days.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is crowing about the so-called Zune Halo Effect that will help Windows Vista sales.

That scenario doesn’t say much about either one.

Craziness continues elsewhere. A new law for our friends in Australia makes the iPod legal. Think about it.

Apple’s stock price, just a few years ago deep in the doldrums, is approaching record levels nearly every day, and the company’s market cap is higher than Dell Computer. Billions higher.

The recording industry negotiated a deal with Microsoft to pay the Windows maker for every Zune sold. That’s crazy, but nuttier things have happened—mostly over the past two years.

Is the earth in some kind of strange alignment with a celestial body? No, not Gisele Bundchen, though she shows up in a Mac TV commercial.

So, after record setting performance—market share, sales, unit sales, profits, iPod market share domination, switch to Intel chips, and much more—who’s the best CEO on the planet? Steve Jobs, right? Wrong.

Warren Buffet? Nope. John Chambers of Cisco? No. Mark Hurd of Hewlett-Packard? Uh uh. Who? Robert Iger of Walt Disney. At least it wasn’t Steve Ballmer of Microsoft.

See? The past two years have been the strangest ever for those of us who follow Apple in our little Mac world. What about you? Do you see some craziness going on?

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