the Apple geek run-down of D5

Wednesday was a busy day at D5 - All Things Digital, and I'm sure that their website is reaping the traffic rewards for it now.

Their site has complete videos of all of the sessions. The prologue to the Jobs/Gates interview was a nice little trip down memory lane (how great was the Mac dating game?), and it links to the full videos elsewhere. The web is falling all over itself to talk about it, although it seems like the only thing to say about it is that Gates and Jobs make nice. But you can watch the video for yourself.

Steve Jobs had a solo interview where he didn't really tell us anything new or interesting, other than the announcement that they're adding YouTube to AppleTV. There's a part of me that's not convinced by this idea. The only time that I go to YouTube is when someone sends me a link to a video there. I don't surf YouTube, the signal:noise ratio is too high for me to bother with. Of course, the signal:noise ratio is 100% subjective -- I'm entirely surprised that a video spoofing my hometown has actually been viewed more than 1300 times, or that there are actually 68 separate videos up there tagged with my hometown's name. Those 68 videos are total noise unless you live (or have lived) there. But in better news, iLounge says that YouTube will be providing videos designed for AppleTV in H.264.

In Microsoft-y news, Steve Ballmer (too many Steves in my neck of the woods) demoed Microsoft Surface. I got to see it in action during last year's Microsoft company meeting. It's really cool (and I don't just say that on the extremely off-chance that SteveB stumbles across my blog one afternoon). I can't wait to see it in a real-world setting. But I feel like we need someone else to name our products. Microsoft Surface? Couldn't we have come up with something cooler than that?