Source: Wolfram Alpha

But what makes Apple so great? Why do I like it so much ? Well, being born and raised in Italy I have been surrounded by the art masterpieces throughout my life and being an engineer, I like building new, useful artifacts. Italians used to be the best at doing that. Leonardo da Vinci was the first. Enzo Ferrari did that with his cars, Adriano Olivetti did that with his business machines at a larger scale, and Steve Jobs does it with his consumer computing machines, and at a scale that nobody has ever done it. No large company has managed to be as great as Apple at incorporating innovative technologies in beutiful and useful designs. The video below is about the progression of Apple products that over the years have led to the iPad.

Transparent House used its visualization capabilities to create a tribute to a company they greatly admire on the occasion of the iPad release. The idea was to show a glimpse into the history of this product giant by modeling some of the innovative products they’ve developed in their 3+ decade history.

Anatomy of Apple Design from Transparent House on Vimeo.

See also:

AppleInsider | Transparent House creates “Anatomy of Apple Design” iPad tribute.

Apple approaches $200 billion

The iPad will grab significant market share from longtime Windows users. There is a large pool of Windows XP and Vista users that are just tired of Windows and have considered switching to an Apple computer but have not switched yet because of the price point of the entry level MacBook ($999). Those users are mostly interested in web browsing, email and light use of office-like applications. Apple has packed in the iPad multitouch versions of Safari, Mail and a completely rewritten iWork suite. In addition, iPad makes it easy to listen to and manage music, view and manage photos and videos, and I predict that it will be the best eBook reader available. Plus, all the iPhone apps will work on the iPad and developers will create new, great apps for the iPad using the excellent iPhone (and now iPad) SDK. The SDK is really a piece of art. I have developed in many platforms using many languages. The iPhone SDK and its documentation are the absolute best development platform that I ever worked with. Just today Apple has released a new beta version of the SDK loaded with new, great APIs for anything ranging from location, to advanced text, to video and more.

Netbooks are really just cheap laptops. Every time I tried a netbook it felt like a piece of junk that was going to fall apart any second. Cramming a demanding desktop operating system into an underpowered hardware sounds like a recipe for disappointment. Keyboard and screen are too small and performance is too sluggish.

The iPad plays the strengths of Apple’s ability to integrate hardware and software to support each other and the results are so great that the iPhone has brought Augmented Reality to the real-world, a cutting-edge technology that was relegated to the “maybe one day” shelf for many years.

One other thing that I’d like to point out is that Apple has again innovated also by removing features. In the past, it got rid of the floppy disk, then replaced the RS232 serial and parallel ports with the USB port. Now, Apple is unapologetically removing the file system from the personal device. Users will still be able to access their content but they will do it from the most natural place: the application designated to manage the files. This is a great move as in my experience the usability of a hierarchical file system decreases with the number of file and folders. If you need to export or share a file, you can do it conveniently through the cloud.

Also today is the news that a Norwegian retailer has stopped taking pre-orders of Apple iPads due to overwhelming demand. Even more incredible is that the largest portion of orders skew heavily towards the more expensive 64GB iPad with 3G. The same has been true for the US demand of 3GS iPhones. People want these technologies. Users are abandoning the “good enough” mentality that has driven the first wave of personal computing and are now demanding a clean, flawless experience from a device that they will interact with for most hours of their life.

All the above is why the iPad is going to revolutionize the personal (and connected) computing world!

See also: “Why the iPad is so revolutionary” by Joe Hewitt, creator of the popular Facebook iPhone App

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As many know I have been a proud Apple shareholder for quite a bit. In a way, it is because I value the Warren Buffett approach of investing in few stocks whose business I understand. Right after my olive oil business, Apple is the business that I believe I understand the best. And I am excited about what the near and long term future might bear for my dear Cupertino stock. In particular, call me a fool but I totally buy the argument made by Jason Schwarz of Seeking Alpha, that basically states the following:

1. the P/E ratio is the single most important number in the world
2. Apple has consistently traded at an average P/E ratio of 32.17
3. forward P/E ratio is calculated from future estimated earnings. the average forward P/E ratio for Apple since 2003 is 22.48. Based on the new accounting rules soon to be put in place, and the 37 billion in cash that Apple has on their books, Apple’s forward P/E is below 13
4. This stock has not been priced this cheaply since Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997
5. the stock should be priced at $263 today and should reach $376 by September 30, 2010, and could very likely be at $456 by the close of its fiscal year on September 30th.

Enjoy the whole spill at Seeking Alpha.

Apple stock is cheap! Load it up NOW and order your Ferrari for Christmas 2010!

Now go ahead and post a comment here if you agree or prove Jason wrong if you have a better argument.

I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Public Radio Player 2.0 for iPhone and iPod Touch. This app is already half way in the top 10 free Music apps on the iTunes App Store. PRP 2.0 was developed by a team assembled by the great minds at Public Radio Exchange (PRX). Bringing this app to life has been possible thanks to the contribution of many stakeholders. My involvement with this project has been primarily as an expert in hybrid development techniques for the iPhone. Hybrid apps are a class of apps developed primarily using web standards (HTML, CSS and Javascript), then wrapped around a native Objective C/Cocoa Touch so that they can be conveniently distributed as binary via iTunes App Store. There are several advantages of following this approach to building iPhone apps:

1. Short learning curve: Objective C is not as easy to learn as Javascript
2. Faster development time: no need to compile app to test it as Javascript is interpreted
3. Tapping into a large pool of talent: there are far more web developers than Objective C ones
4. Portability: WebKit, the core engine for Mobile Safari, is also the core engine for other evolved smartphones web browsers such as Android, Palm Pre and Nokia’s Symbian.

Looking forward to it. Some pictures have already leaked and they have widely been considered legitimate, including this one, most likely for the new aluminum MacBook.

MacRumors.com has the latest, including a price list showing MacBooks (?) going for as low as $899.

UPDATE: AppleInsider has also a summary of the latest MacBook rumors.