Rory Cellan-Jones who writes a blog on the BBC ¦ News website has taken a bashing from the ‘Cult of Mac’ over his coverage of the iPhone. His post ‘Style or Substance‘ documents some of the responses to his news broadcast for the BBC covering the launch of Apple’s new ‘reinvented phone’.

Much in the same way as Rory I try to be objective in my views about products from any vendor of software or hardware. I use both PC’s and Mac’s, Windows and MacOS. I use Google, Windows Live, Yahoo! and .Mac. I use an Xbox, Xbox 360 and Gamecube (never owned a Playstation). I use a Sony PSP and a Nintendo DS. I use, and love, Windows Media Center, I use FrontRow on a Mac.

I know a good few people like this too. As Dan mentioned on his posting about Steve Job’s MacWorld ‘07 keynote, he, Ashleigh, Mark, and myself watched the progress of the keynote with interest. As is always the case on ‘Apple day’, as Mark calls it, there is mixed reaction to Apple’s announcements. Dan and I, being fans of what Apple do, tend to ackowledge that Apple don’t invent anything these days they simply do a good job of packaging the solution for people. Ashleigh and Mark (especially Mark :-)) tend to poo-poo everything that Apple announce saying that it’s been done before and potentially better by Microsoft. Actually, that’s strictly not true as Ashleigh just prefers to bash Yahoo! than anyone else. [I was annoyed that Yahoo! is the default search engine in Flock for Windows].

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that we’ve all got our favourites but we all acknowledge who is good at what. Mark owns an iPod for instance and for someone who drools over Windows Powershell that’s probably saying something. I couldn’t imagine using a Mac in my place of work for anything other than testing that applications designed for the Web run on it. The iPhone I see as primarily a consumer device and not something for the enterprise. Will DirectPush email from Exchange work on an iPhone? I imagine some software house or individual somewhere will write the plugin at some point.

With the iPhone I think Apple are really going back to their roots. Maybe that’s why there were lots of pictures of Woz and Jobs drifting across the screen towards the end of the MacWorld keynote. This is a time of change for Apple, Inc. They’ve moved from Apple Computer, Inc. vendor and markerter of high class, desireable home and business computing into Apple, Inc. vendor of high class, desireable media, communications and computing solutions. The transistion has taken a few years with the iPod and iTunes paving the way.

Both Microsoft and Apple produce excellent products. Some of them are better than others but neither of them has got everything 100% right in terms of design, features, price and cool.

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