At O’Reilly conferences like this week’s Money:Tech, where businesspeople outnumber developers, the tool of choice to enable continuous partial attention is a mobile device, not a laptop. To my surprise, roughly 80% of my Money:Tech rowmates had iPhones in hand. I expected New Yorkers to be a Blackberry crowd, but it looks like Tim was on to something when he predicted that the iPhone will beat the Blackberry.
A few more recent random data points about Apple’s momentum:
Radarite Nat Torkington reports that developer Layton Duncan of Polar Bear Farm, a trailblazing developer of cool native iPhone applications, was high on his list of “most interesting people I met at Kiwi Foo.”
After a few weeks with his new iPhone, Grant McCracken was surprised to realize that he’d probably switch to the Mac when he got his next computer. He wants the iPhone’s elegant, user-friendly design on his laptop, too.
Longtime ace coder and Foo Duncan Davidson (who moonlights as the photographer at our conferences) said he’d been
getting a noticeable increase in requests to develop for OS X. His corporate clients are investing in the Mac platform.
On their own, none of these anecdotes is wildly surprising. Taken together, especially when they all pop up in the course of 36 hours, they point to continued growth in Mac market share.