Happy New Year all!

Since we all work on Macs in some way shape or form, I thought I’d talk a bit about Apple Inc. to start the year.  As a company, Apply is as strong as it has ever been and looks to continue to dominate the consumer market with new desktop & laptop computers, phones and other personal gadgets that are designed to make our lives easier.  Is the Apple tablet computer coming soon???  Hmmm, we'll see!  On the enterprise side, I think Apple did the right thing by dropping the Xserve Raid and continuing to upgrade the Xserve itself.  The Xserve is one of the most popular servers we help integrate into our customers sites especially with small to medium sized Xinet installs as it performs well in those areas.  I think Apple will continue to grow and refine it's Xserve product over time mostly because the server version of Mac OS X is fairly straight forward to maintain by an IT professional compared with other systems.  That's not to say it's super easy to maintain the Mac OS, just a little more "mac" like with buttons to enable a service versus editing a config file in a text editor for example.  You know what I mean right!?!?

On another note, MacWorld this year normally would fall on the second week in January but has been moved to mid-February this year.  Why?  Well for one reason, Apple as a company is not going to be exibiting at this years MW and the Consumer Electronics show in Vegas has always been on the same week as MW.  So, IDG (the people organizing MW and plenty of other trade shows) decided to move it out to February.  I for one am happy since there is no "overshadowing" of either show now and . . . I've never been to San Francisco in February!  Yeah, probably not much different than going in January but it'll be something different, I guess....  So, what will Macworld be like without Apple???  My guess is a litte smaller, a little less hype, and less people but, MW lives (for now any way).  Some people say this one will be the last.  I have no clue if that is the case but what I can say is that Apple fans of all types will still be there and even if there is no MacWorld 2011, there still will be passion for a company that makes gadgets intended to make our lives easier.  I'd even bet that there will be more Apple fans next year but I can't say for sure because my crystal ball is not working right now.  It runs on Vista! :)

Look for a new blog entry after MacWorld as I will report on what I find while out there.  For now, Happy New Year and may 2010 be the best year so far!

Oh and one more thing, if you or anyone in your company plans on attending MacWorld, drop me a line so we can discuss Xinet's new Suite 16 upgrade over an Irish Coffee or whatever adult beverage you prefer!

Brian Dolan

<bdolan@napc.com>