Upon hearing the revival of the ZuneFone rumours, the Macelope.. well I am not sure how Macelopes vocalizes, but this is what was communicated:

But why is the Macalope thrilled by this news? He is thrilled because a Zune phone must, by the comic laws that govern our universe, be simply hysterical. And the Macalope’s not going to let Michael Gartenberg’s staid, reasonable analysis stand in the way of his dream of one day being able to point at a Zune phone and summon his inner Nelson Muntz.

Ha. Ha.

From Cult of Mac, Macenstein did an idea-fish for a new ad campaign by Apple. In it, Christian-hater and Master of the argument by outrage and incredulity, Richard, “I Must be Smart Because I have a Cool Accent” Dawkins is reading his hate mail.

I would be much more interested in watching him write his hate books. The image of Dawkins and an Apple product is almost enough to make me want to switch to anything he hates. Someone please tell me that the Grand Dragon of the KKK and/or Phelpps do not use Apple products. Please.

If you haven’t guessed it, I don’t think too highly of the “new atheists” who are raw anti-Christian bigots who don’t have the cajones to dare try to pull that crap with Islam. Anyhoo, it was a funny idea.

From MacDailyNews:

When Barclays’ Ben Reitzes refers to the ’stickiness’ of Apple’s iPhone, he’s not talking about adhesives on the product’s surface,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.

“What he’s referring to in a report to clients issued Tuesday is a lock-in effect, whereby iPhone and iPod touch owners who buy from the App Store become increasing unlikely to switch to a competing product. Reitzes calls this a ‘key differentiating factor,’” Elmer-DeWitt reports.

From AppleTell, Steve Wozniak to compete on Dancing With the Stars?

The Great Awakening:

Some say it all started when Bill Gates admitted that the term icons — which are windows into heaven — and thus, Windows, are really trademarked by the Orthodox Church; not to mention when Steve Jobs and others finally came clean about that Apple design going back thousands of years to the very Genesis of man.

Yep, after those two saw the light the money really started rolling in!

30 Seconds that Changed the World (go to the link for full story):

In exclusive interviews, Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, and Andy Hertzfeld, one of the developers, recall how it happened.

The Macintosh, priced between $1,995 and $2,495, aimed to change all that by introducing an affordable machine using the window-and-mouse system Jobs had seen on a visit to Xerox, which had an early version of the system. “It was obvious that every computer in the world would work this way someday,” Jobs said later.

But how to tell people of the dramatic change it would offer? Not for Jobs a standard advert showing the machine. Instead, in the science fiction spot – overseen by Blade Runner director Ridley Scott – a legion of worker drones are lectured by a huge, Big Brother-like entity representing IBM and the existing computer companies.

Into the picture runs a young woman, symbolising Apple, who is chased by armed police before smashing the screen and freeing the enslaved masses. An ominous, movie-trailer voice then intones: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984′.”

The ad has since been hailed as one of the greatest ever because of its audacious approach and immediate impact. But it also reflected, in part, the optimism and – even hubris – of the young millionaires in charge of the company. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak remembers the first time he saw the commercial.

“[Jobs] sat me down in front of a U-Matic tape machine and played the 1984 ad, one time,” he told the Guardian in an interview last week. “I was stunned. I was a bit naïve – I thought it was incredible science fiction. It was very rebellious in a sense. I said ‘Wow, we’re going to show this at the Super Bowl? This is the best ad I’ve ever seen.’”

According to Wozniak, Jobs said the company’s board had decided against showing the spot because of the $800,000 price for a Super Bowl premiere – almost leading Wozniak to dip into his own pockets, even though cost wasn’t the real reason they’d gone cold on it.

“I didn’t realise the board had turned it down because they were shaky about coming out against Big Blue… I thought it was the money,” he says. “I thought about it and thought about it. Steve and I were pretty wealthy by then, so I said ‘I’ll pay half if you pay the other half… this thing should be shown – this is us.’”

In the end, however, it was approved – and seen by an estimated 97 million people. The Mac was born. Though even by then the project had been running for nearly five years.