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Apple (AAPL) is the only company I know that can tell its customers what they want and make them like it. Nobody else has pulled that off since Henry Ford decreed that consumers could get a Model T in any color they liked as long as it was black. The latest MacBook and MacBook Pro computers suggest that Apple has not lost its touch.

The difference between Apple and the rest of the industry is stark. Dell (DELL) sells 26 laptop models, each available in many configurations, while Apple offers five, with few hardware options. The average selling price for MacBooks and MacBook Pros in September was $1,483, compared with $689 for Windows notebooks, according to market researcher NPD Group. The point isn't that Macs are overpriced for what they are but that Apple offers only high-end products. Yet despite these seeming disadvantages in variety and price, NPD notes, Macs grabbed nearly 18% of the U.S. retail notebook market in September, a jump of nearly three percentage points since last year.

It's not easy to come up with a dramatic design breakthrough in what is largely a mature product category. Last year, Apple offered the revolutionary MacBook Air, but its extreme thinness and lightness was achieved at a sacrifice in functionality that wouldn't be O.K. in its workhorse laptops.
A Solid Lineup

The latest notebooks should keep Apple's winning streak going. The two new products are a 15-in. MacBook Pro (from $1,999) and a 13.3-in. MacBook (from $1,299), now in a Pro-like aluminum case. Rounding out Apple's family are the old white MacBook ($999), the 17-in. MacBook Pro (from $2,799), and the Air (from $1,799). The last two models got processor and graphics upgrades but are otherwise unchanged.

The most striking feature of the new laptops is their huge and extremely usable touch pad. I have long preferred pointing sticks to touch pads, but Apple's latest innovation might change my mind. As in the last generation of MacBooks, this pad uses multitouch: One finger moves the cursor, two fingers scroll the display. What's new is there's no button—just press firmly on the pad, and you feel a button-like click. One finger gives a standard mouse click. Press with two and you bring up a menu appropriate for what you are doing, just like a right click on the mouse. It's simple, and it works.

The MacBook Pro is equipped with two Nvidia (NVDA) graphics adapters. Users can switch between a GeForce 9600M GT to get maximum performance for games, video editing, or other graphically intense applications, and a less capable 9400M chip for best battery life. Expect similar dual-graphics technology to show up on high-end Windows notebooks as well.
Older Hardware Connections Impacted

MacBook fans may find some other changes disconcerting. Apple is relentless in scrapping old technologies. This time, that may be painful for users of older external monitors and video cameras. Both new Mac models use an external video connector called DisplayPort that only plugs directly into the new $899 Apple LED Cinema Display. For all other monitors, you'll need a $29 adapter. Try using an older video camera and there's a worse catch. Apple has eliminated the FireWire port on the MacBook, rendering cameras that connect to computers only with a Firewire cable unusable. The Pro does have a FireWire port, but it's a new version, called 800, so you'll need another adapter cable to use it with a FireWire 400 camera.

With special software, it is now easy to run Microsoft Outlook and other Windows programs on the Mac. I use VMware's Fusion 2.0 virtual machine software on the MacBook Pro, and the results are so good that I'm longing to take a Mac laptop on the road. But that's where Apple's limited variety is a problem. At 4½ lb., even the 13-in. MacBook is too heavy, while the Air is too limited. Oh, well. Apple has never tried to be all things to all people. It may not solve my problem, but Apple's way seems to work just fine for the company and most of its fans.

Cisco Systems has dominated its markets for the past fifteen years. But compared with the other great tech companies, the company has always seemed to be more of a beneficiary of mega-trends, than a creator of them. IBM created the computer industry in its image in the 1960s and 1970s. Microsoft and Intel drove the PC revolution in the 1980s and 1990s. Google is leading the way into the cloud computing era. But Cisco? Whether fair or not, the general impression is that it was in the right place at the right time, as the top maker of basic networking gear just as the Net Economy was exploding.

Now, Cisco wants to put its stamp on the next epoch of the Net’s development, with a concept it calls the “MediaNet.” The idea is to meld together a range of technologies and services that will make the Net far better at handling video and other rich media. For many people, video is kind of sideshow on the Net—a medium for watching the occasional YouTube video before getting back to real work. But MediaNet “will make video the natural language of the Internet,” says Cisco senior vice president of emerging technologies Marthin De Beer. “We think this will be as big or bigger than the World Wide Web. This is Web 3.0 we’re talking about here.”


At a high level, MediaNet is a powerful, and necessary, idea. One element in a range of announcements today is a new study that predicts a six-fold increase in Net traffic by 2012—by which time 90% of the bits will be for video rather than the text and images the Web was initially designed for. Of course, Cisco has every reason to set such expectations, since video is a bandwidth hog that could keep the company on a steep growth path for many years to come. (Interestingly, Cisco thinks the vast majority of this video will be of the professional type, rather than user-generated media. By then, Cisco believes Hollywood and other professional content creators will have embraced IP as a more efficient means to reach the world’s consumers, whether delivered straight over the Net to your PC or via your cable or phone carrier's IPTV service).

So what will the MediaNet do? For starters, it will enable the Net to bear the burden of this increased video load. (Here's a CNET piece with their view of the initiative.) But the company also feels video can be delivered in far more useful, entertaining ways. Just as Cisco has built aspects of security, VoIP and other technologies right into its basic networking products, it wants to do the same with promising new technologies such as video search. That way, it would be far easier to not only find a particular video clip (say, of Obama’s inauguration address), but actually find the few seconds you’re interested in (say, Obama’s comments about the Detroit bail-out). Companies would be able to do the same with in-house video content--including, if Cisco has its way, of hours of videoconferencing sessions you're company will be having using its tele-presence systems.

Here's another key part of the vision: Cisco says Moore’s Law has progressed to the point that it can now solve the incompatibility problems that have plagued the Net video world. One job of a new product announced today called the Media Experience Engine will be to automatically handle conversions between data formats, screen sizes and device sizes. That way, a video shot on a Flip video camera would be adjusted within milliseconds to look as good as possible on a 50-inch LCD. Or an HD broadcast of this week's Bears game could be compressed and resized for quick viewing on an iPhone while you're in the cab from the airport. “Everyone is going to have to buy a lot more bandwidth [as the amount of video on the Net increases]," says De Beer. “But the MediaNet answers a different question: how do we make video pervasive and useful, to anyone on any device.” He even foresees the day when businessman from different lands could have videoconferences with instantaneous language translation.

It’s all very sweeping and sexy, which is what makes me skeptical. For now, MediaNet seems to be an overly-broad marketing initiative, large enough to include pretty much any video-related product the company chooses to sell (or acquire; here's a good New York Times piece on new video search offerings). Also, I wonder how Cisco will garner industry support, for a plan that would clearly enhance the company's already dominant position in a host of markets.

And yet that same breadth of influence is why MediaNet just might give Cisco the thought leadership it covets. As the dominant networking provider across all major segments, it has a say over how a movie studio distributes its flicks via the Net; over the wired and wireless networks the phone and cable companies use to get them to their destination; and over the in-home gear consumers will use to receive and watch those movies. As such, Cisco is the only company that can influence the entire online video ecoystem. “Cisco was the inventor of the Internet from a router point of view, and we will be very involved in building the next phase of the Internet and the next generation of Internet experiences,” says De Beer.

So get ready to hear a lot more about the MediaNet, starting with CEO John Chambers’ comments at its annual meeting with Wall Street analysts on Dec. 9. But what’s your hunch? Will this MediaNet idea help Cisco upgrade its reputation from the Internet's top plumber, to one of its key architects? Or will MediaNet be forgotten a year from now--just one more breathless marketing campaign that failed to find traction?

The Core i7 launch comes as overall PC demand is weakening in markets around the world. To what extent the new chips will convince buyers to upgrade their systems remains to be seen, and industry observers will be watching closely.

On Wednesday, Intel sent stock markets diving with a warning that it's fourth-quarter revenue will be sharply lower than the company's earlier estimates, signaling that demand for PCs was falling short of expectations. The chip maker also warned that gross margins, a broad measure of the company's profitability, will be lower than expected at 55 percent instead of the previous estimate of 59 percent.

"Revenue is being affected by significantly weaker than expected demand in all geographies and market segments," Intel said in a statement.

Intel said the revised gross margin estimate was primarily caused by lower revenue projections, but also blamed "other charges associated with the weaker-than-expected demand environment."

Those other charges include the cost of excess capacity and inventory write-offs, according to a research note put out by Credit Suisse analyst John Pitzer, who said the slowdown in PC demand will persist beyond December.

"We expect the weaker demand environment to persist into at least 1H09," Pitzer wrote, referring to the first half of next year.

As a result, Pitzer lowered his 2009 revenue forecast for Intel to $33.8 billion, a decline of 12% compared to his 2008 forecast. He also said Intel's gross margin could fall to 50% during the first quarter of 2009 due to lower revenue, the cost of carrying excess production capacity, inventory write-offs, and startup costs for Intel's upcoming 32-nanometer process technology.

Ericsson achieves 100Mbps rates in LTE trials

Ericsson expects that the first commercial network of LTE next-generation mobile technology will go live in the fourth quarter of 2009

Ericsson has managed to achieve rates in excess of 100Mbps with next-generation mobile technology LTE (Long Term Evolution) during recent field trials.

LTE is pitched as a successor to the 3G (third generation) mobile services such as the European UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) and similar wide-band CDMA (W-CDMA) services.

[ For more on LTE and its struggle to become the dominant architecture for broadband wireless infrastructure , read "The looming battle over wireless broadband." And find out more about rival WiMax in InfoWorld's report "Does WiMax work in the real world?" ]

Ericsson's goal in the field trials was to show that LTE works all the way from the base station to the terminal. "It's always easy to say that you can get a certain speed in a lab environment, but here we have used real antennas and real distances to the terminals, and also in a moving vehicle," said Lars Tilly, head of research at Ericsson Mobile Platforms.

Using four transmit streams (the maximum number supported in the LTE standard), four receive antennas and bandwidth of 10MHz, the measured peak rates exceeded 130Mbps. This translates into approximately 260Mbps, given the maximum bandwidth of 20MHz, according to an article in Ericsson Review.

"Not everyone will be able to get 100Mbps. You need pretty good conditions for it to work, and you need to be relatively close to the base stations, a couple of hundred meters," said Tilly.

The company also evaluated application-level performance using two transmit and two receive antennas, and the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) bit rate was more than 40Mbps at least 50 percent of the time and more than 100Mbps at least 10 percent of the time along a test route, which a majority of the time stayed within 1 kilometer from the test site.

The test also shows how important it is to use MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) to get the most out of LTE. Using four transmit and receive antennas increase performance by a factor of three compared to a basic setup. But at the same time Ericsson warns that MIMO-related gains are strongly dependent on radio conditions.

All the major telecommunications equipment vendors are currently working at full speed to get LTE out the door, according to Martin Gutberlet, analyst at Gartner.

He isn't worried about the base stations. Instead it's the lack of access to the necessary spectrum, which still hasn't been handed out in many European countries, including U.K., France, and Germany, that could lead to delays, according to Gutberlet.

Ericsson expects that the first commercial LTE network will go live in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to a spokeswoman.