“We’ve been here before: three years ago, to be exact. The drill was the same. Months of frenzied blogging culminated in ecstatic cheers on Jan. 9, 2007, when Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, brandished a prototype iPhone before an adoring audience of Apple nuts at a convention in San Francisco,” Rawsthorn reports. “What’s happened since? Not only has Apple sold tens of millions of iPhones, it has pulled off a stunningly successful exercise in design democracy whereby thousands of D.I.Y. designers have developed applications, or programs, for them. Some 100,000 ‘apps’ have been invented, and more than two billion downloaded from Apple’s App Store. What’s almost more impressive is that Apple has achieved this despite its own history — and instincts — as the consummate corporate control freak.”
MacDailyNews Note: According to AppShopper, there were 115,000 apps available in Apple’s Ap Store as of December 16, 2009.
Rawsthorn continues, “Mr. Jobs is expected to show off the iSlate (as we’ll call it, if only because that’s the latest rumor) in San Francisco later this month. If the bloggers are right, it will hit the stores in March.. If the iSlate is another of the company’s successes, it promises to have as much impact as the iPhone, if not more.”
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