I think it’s so cool that Intel’s upcoming notebook platform is code-named “Santa Rosa” after my home town. It just makes me feel like I live somewhere special (as if I didn’t think that already!). Hooray for Santa Rosa!

I checked out the new MacBook a few days ago at my local Apple store, and I was quite impressed. I thought the iBook design couldn’t be beat, and I still like my iBook G4 a whole lot, but the MacBook (even with the slightly bigger width) is a small, sleek bundle of power that is really on a whole new level. A next-generation product, no doubt about it. I’ll post soon with some of my observations, especially regarding the strange and unique keyboard design.

Needless to say, I believe Apple will sell millions of them this year. They’re really, really cool!

I feel like I’m posting on the Signal vs. Noise blog with this one, but what the hey. I was just reading a TIME article on the Nintendo Wii, which to my non-gamer brain sounds like a great product, and I was struck by the brilliance of the philosophy behind the design of the Wii. From the article:

But the name Wii not wii-thstanding, Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal–they blog a lot–but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds.”

Wow, another company besides Apple that actually “gets it”. As the article goes on to discuss, one of the main reasons the iPod rose to dominance was precisely because it eschewed the “more features and more power is better” school of product development in favor of “simple and fun and elegant is better”. Nintendo is betting on the same philosophy to help them gain a lead on their arch-rivals in the console business. I believe it will work.

And I believe this is a good time to tell the truth about innovation: it doesn’t work if you are letting your customers design your products for you. Don’t give customers what they want, give customers what they need. If you can figure that out better than anyone else, you’ve won.

‘Tis the night before Tuesday, and all through my brain, I’m hoping tomorrow brings joy and not pain!

Ugh. Leaving aside for a moment my horrible poetry skills, I’d like to tell you how excited I am about the new MacBooks that Apple is about to release. It’s not certain tomorrow is the day, but it’s certainly going to be with the next couple of weeks according to just about everyone’s prediction. The reason I’m so excited about this is because the iBook is the coolest little notebook around (I use my iBook G4 constantly and love it to pieces) — except for the fact that it is just too underpowered by today’s standards. Plus the matte (and IMHO dull) white finish and thick, kiddie case are starting to get long in the tooth. The MacBook will likely sport a sleeker, sexier case, and will most certainly boast a dramatically faster architecture. Plus with the prospect of using Windows via dual-booting and virtualization at near-native speeds when it’s time to do some boring office task or play the odd game or two, the whole package makes me salivate. I haven’t been this excited about a new Mac coming out since the Mac mini debuted in January of 2005.

If we’re really, really lucky, we might even see a price drop. Who knows? At any rate, the iBook has had a good, long run, and I love mine dearly — but it’s time for a big change. Apple, don’t fail us now!