The new MacBook Air is very slim and very pretty. Check out the photos of Steve’s keynote I shot for Engadget. Now it’s time to finally wrap up my grand CES story.

Joshua Allen recently dug into the rumor that IdentityMine, one of Microsoft’s most valuable partners, uses Macs for their cross-platform interactive design work.

You can imagine my consternation when I visited the offices of such a great partner, and discovered a bunch of their developers and designers using Macintoshes! In this interview, I try to get to the bottom of things and find out why the heck they are using Macs.

Nathan Dunlap demos how he does his day-to-day work using Vista and Expression Blend on the Mac, talks about his favorite software packages, provides some tips and tricks, and more. Be sure to watch all the way through for a humorous anecdote about his Macintosh overheating and melting (I’m not kidding).

(Joshua Allen)

The loudest CEO around is hosting an employee town hall right now, and he’s addressing a handful of areas where Microsoft can make progress. When talking about search he highlighted an interesting principle, “The market leader has no incentive to disrupt.” While Google will obviously continue to throw maximum resources at improving their search abilities and their model of giving away developed software is hard to answer, they truely don’t want to see the game change.

There’s also a difficult lesson to take from the operating system business that can be applied here: Windows being the strong leader has been a good thing, but Mac OS X has been able to grow significantly through being the underdog and changing the game. It’s not hard to imagine Microsoft being in the same position relative to Google, which gives us huge incentive and opportunity to grow.

I had a great conversation at work on Friday. Rory Blyth is a Channel 9 person, as he puts it, and he’s been at Microsoft for some time longer than I have. He’s also joyously verbose, which is just my brand of gin, and so our conversation was easily one of the best I’ve had since beginning this segment of my life.

We talked mostly about my frustrations with the Microsoft experience, in an attempt on my part to reconcile my Apple-fied cortex with my relatively earnest desire to appreciate Windows. I gave him some of my chief complaints in Windows Mobile (the complexity of the user experience and the apparent lack of simplicity as a design priority). I also drew out my Vista installation gripe, something I’ve pitched to just about anyone who will listen.

The brilliant thing Rory was able to do was to interpret my issues clearly and explain the thinking behind them. While I ultimately don’t agree with the motives behind why Windows Mobile or the Vista installer are built the way they are, what was more important was how Rory made me feel about it.

Previously the people I’ve spoken to at Microsoft about my issues have left me with the sense that I either didn’t ‘get it’ or that I was at the nonexistent mercy of Microsoft’s intertia. Instead, Rory explained the logic behind the design decisions and, in spite of my disagreement, I was able to see the logic for the first time.

Thanks Rory…air knuckles ;)

According to his temporary blog, Wil Wheaton expressed his distaste for losing all of his purchased iTunes music and not having a way to retrieve it. After doing so, ‘Kate’ from Apple called him:

She said that Apple wants to keep their customers happy, and ensure that they’ll be confident purchasing things from the iTunes Music Store, so she was going to push a Big Red Button that would allow me to have a do over, and download all of my purchased music again, free of charge. This seemed excessive to me, and way above what would be reasonably expected, but before I could tell her that, she told me that she’d read on my blog that I didn’t expect Apple to treat me any differently than they’d treat any other customer. She assured me that this is Apple’s corporate policy, and they’ll do this for anyone who has a catastrophic loss of their iTunes Music Store purchases, regardless of the cause.

Pretty sweet. I almost want to blow away my library just to prove the point.

I love a good Apple rumor as much as the next geek, but this one is just a bit too stinky. The Appleinsider article published on the rumored Apple mobile phone this morning at 11:00 EST. An excerpt from the article:

…Shaw Wu told clients in a research note on Tuesday. “We believe this smart phone has been in development for over 12 months and has overcome substantial challenges including design, interference, battery life and other technical glitches.”

Now enter TheStreet.com and Senior Writer Scott Moritz. This TheStreet.com article was posted at 13:06 EDT, and features the following quote:

“We believe this smart phone has been in development for over 12 months and has overcome substantial challenges including design, interference, battery life, and other technical glitches. As we have seen in the smart phone space, it is very difficult to produce a converged product of high quality,” [Peter] Lin writes.

First off, how exactly does TheStreet.com occupy a different ribbon of the 4th dimension from Appleinsider?

Aside from these two sites and their war on time, MacNN and ArsTechnica have both published similar articles featuring some collection of the names Peter Lin and Albert Wu.

Is anyone here checking their facts? I mean it’s obvious there aren’t any real facts to check, but come on people this is just bananas.

Sure last week I wrote about how FakeJobs had decided to call out Veronica (who got another mention a few days ago), but now this is just out of hand. From Dan’l Lewin stabs me in the back:

Dude, it’s bad enough that your name is Dan’l. (Poser!) Worse yet that you sold your soul to the devil and you’re working at Microsoft.

I wonder if anyone else will read that headline quite like those of us who know the history between these two. Curiouser and curiouser…

Qua?! Last week Veronica published Prizefight: Apple iPod vs. Toshiba Gigabeat S, wherein she concluded that Toshiba is making the more appealing DAP. Yesterday [fake]Steve called out Veronica as nothing but a cute, oratory-impaired journalist.

V’s conclusion would under normal circumstances get me right hungry for a debate on her decision, as the mental tag-cloud of my childhood features Steve’s name fairly prominently. Here however, the more exciting question is this: Are we one step closer to discovering the true identity of the greatest Apple fan site yet?

UPDATE: V has quoted and responded over at Music and Medicine.