Apple’s recent product announcements were truly amazing. Granted, they are not as monumental as when the first iPhone was announced – you only get a few of those. But the products announced are all sophisticated tools that will make our lives better.
Lets start with the iPhone 5. On the surface, it’s just a bit taller, faster and lighter than the old iPhones. But when you pick it up, you can’t believe how thin and light it is – it’s like a computer wafer. As a tool that I use all day for many diverse things, to have it so accessible is no small thing. How Apple can make it thinner and lighter and way more powerful is a mystery to me. I am sure a small part of it is loosing that 30 pin cable and going for the new lighting cable.

I heard so much yapping about Apple making you buy more stuff, which is crazy talk. If you want more useful space, you need to shake things up, and the connector makes a difference. Also, the computer industry has a long history of making connectors obsolete – anyone have an SCSI cable on anything?

Then there is the iPad mini. As the rumors about this have been floating around, even I was thinking, “Who would want that?”

Thenl I saw the demo.

What Apple did was take away the non-used margin of the iPad and shrunk it about 20 percent so it could fit in one hand. And in the process, it got more affordable. For a moment, think about how far the iPad has come in such a short time. It used to be you would go to a meeting and people would put their iPhones on the table. Now, everyone uses an iPad. That incorporation of the iPad into the business world has surprised me. The guy who came to fix my Uverse had an iPad to check on my system. In the past, Apple was the stuff that was not biz friendly. I also see iPads as display devices in trade shows and “cash registers” in small businesses. So these new iPad minis will go places unthought of before. That adds up to more computing power in the hands (literally) of more people, allowing people to be creative and do more.

Then there is the new iMac. While it does offer a few new, nice things, it just looks stunning. How a computer can be thinner than many TVs is nothing short of amazing.

Apple keeps on innovating – look at these products against the competitors. Enough said.

The thing to keep in mind is that Apple thinks years ahead. If other American companies could innovate as well as Apple, we would be in much better shape.