@iCello Point taken. iTunes does represent 25% of music sales in the US. However, I think that if you factor in all the ways that people actually acquire music (radio, file-sharing, and streaming), iTunes seems a lot more niche. Music sales just doesn't take into account how most people get most of their music. But yes, iTunes is a pretty significant music retailer, if you can consider any music retailer significant.

@Wesscoast I was pretty careful to use the term "mainstream" rather than "successful". That's the type of success that Michael was talking about in this article. I understand that Apple makes a lot of money from its computer hardware and from it's software businesses. However, Mac hardware and software has not been successful in acquiring significant marketshare, and the only Apple products that have ever been broadly adopted are, as I said, iPod and iPhone.

You can make a case for iTunes, but in my opinion, iTunes was only successful because of the iPod. There weren't millions of Windows users installing iTunes, loving it, and then running out looking for compatible MP3 players, and bringing home an iPod as a result. They were buying iPods, and were made to use iTunes. To argue the opposite, you'd have to find a meaningful percentage of people who use iTunes and DON'T own an iPod. You won't.

But yes, iTunes is, in a manner of speaking, a mainstream product. However, the iTunes Music Store still isn't. I haven't heard specific numbers in a while, but the vast majority of songs in the libraries of iTunes users were not purchased through iTunes. I'd say a hundred to one would be a decent estimate, but even that seems pretty charitable.

Likewise, the App Store may seem like a huge success, and it kind of is. However, the average iPhone owner (which is still a small percentage of the overall cell phone market) only downloads about 10 of the 100,000 apps in the store. Of those, most are free, and the percentage that gets used for longer than 30 days after the initial download is pretty dismal.

Don't get me wrong - Apple makes very good products, knows how to fill a niche, and is incredibly profitable. However, they generally avoid the mainstream on purpose. They don't even make laptops or desktops for less than $1000. (No, the Mini doesn't count. Talk about a niche product!) If Apple does make a $1000 tablet, I'm sure it would be profitable for Apple, but it's not going to be the next iPod.

@Kerensky97 That's not entirely true. In Apple's history, they've only really had two mainstream products: iPod and iPhone. Don't get me wrong, Apple has been able to reap the iPod halo-effect and move a decent number of laptops in the last few years, but you still can't call Macs mainstream.

I also think the jury is out on whether the Apple Tablet will go anywhere. Normal people don't have any use for a $1000 tablet (if they did, the JooJoo wouldn't seem so ridiculous at $500). Even among the Apple-faithful, how many really will drop $1000 for a device wedged so awkwardly between the iPhone and MacBook that they already have?

I agree with pretty much every word here, except for one detail - that niche products never succeed. The iPod was a niche product. At launch, it offered fewer features than competitors (no FM radio, for example), at a much higher price-point. Even when they went mass-market (dropped FireWire, introduced Windows compatibility), it was still a very expensive, single-purpose device.

It is. Chris was joking.

You're misunderstanding. "Facebook-the-entity" stores content. They have an API, which 3rd party apps use to access that content. That's EXACTLY what Palm IS doing to make Synergy work, and what other WebOS apps like FriendsFlow and Palmbook are doing.

The API is not an issue, and it's not what Atheos was complaining about. He seems to think that the WebOS SDK is insufficient to make a good Facebook app, which is total nonsense. Anything that the "native" Facebook app for the iPhone does COULD be done in a WebOS application using the SDK that is available now.

There are certain things that are not possible with the current SDK. Serious gaming is out, but Facebook doesn't make games anyway. Also, Facebook couldn't make an app that integrates their chat with the built-in Messaging application on the Pre (without working with Palm). Apple's "superior" SDK doesn't allow that either (not that it could, since the iPhone can't even do IM without an app).

Just take a look at the Facebook app for the iPhone, and tell me if you see anything that wouldn't be possible using Palm's SDK. I don't think there is anything. Meanwhile, there are certain things that you CAN do on WebOS that you can't do on an iPhone (run in the background, for example), which Facebook could use to build a better experience than is possible using Apple's "native" SDK.

A "native" SDK would be nice for other reasons, but there's actually nothing that one would want from a Facebook application that couldn't already be accomplished through the existing SDK.

Think about it: Facebook is a website! What else do you need that a well-written web app couldn't do? I'm sure that the stuff you'd actually want hardware access for, like photo capture and uploading, is possible though the MojoSDK. Facebook could easily make a full-featured app for WebOS using the existing tools, they just haven't yet.

The Facebook on WebOS situation isn't horrible, but it's really confusing. Synergy pulls in contacts, the mobile site is useful for some stuff, you can upload pics right from the built-in Photos app, Status reading and commenting works well though the official Facebook app, and Palmbook is a very promising homebrew app (though not yet feature-complete).

As a Palm Pre owner, I can interact with Facebook just fine (especially considering how little I actually care about using Facebook). However, there's not one single go-to application that has all the features that anyone could possibly want.

It's not unfair to compare this to a netbook, because it IS a netbook. It'll have an Atom processor, and it will run Linux. Like a netbook, it's primary purpose will be to browse the web. It's a netbook with a touchscreen, and no keyboard.

None. This device is intended for browsing the web ONLY... and that's why it will fail miserably. For the same price (or less), you can get a netbook that does so much more. Sure, cheap netbooks don't have touchscreens, but I'd rather have a keyboard on a portable computer than a touchscreen anyway.