(or whatever it will eventually be called)

I have to admit that I sat through the whole 2 hour MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs and got more and more excited about the new iPhone. After today's announcement of Cisco's lawsuit over the name it might eventually be called something different (like the AppleTV instead of iTV) but it will not change anything about the sexiness of that machine.

One thing was disappointing though in Apple's presentation - and that was taking credit for things that was not quite theirs. I agree that apple puts things together and created a synergy out of pieces that it finds, but it does not invent all the pieces.

Like the mouse - no, it was not Apple, it was Xerox - or better, people at Xerox - who invented the mouse. Yes, they did not see any commercial value in it, but Apple did. Yet, Apple did not invent the mouse.

And they also did not invent - as far as I can tell - the multi touch screen.

The first time I saw the multi touch demonstration by Jeff Han on TED I was like - where can I get this?

Click on the image to see for yourself.

So when Steve Jobs demonstrated the magnify function on the iPhone I was impressed and happy to see it in a real application in the real world, but it was also a deja vu.

Apple does great things and I don't think they really need to take credit where none should be taken. If they would be able to give credit away a bit more that would actually become them well. I learned in my studies of macrobiotic that arrogance is the highest level of sickness. As such it is only just before the final crash. I mean they - Apple - have done it once before. They were nearly gone, and hadn't they been very arrogant in their view of "everything else" computing just before they nearly died?

I don't want them gone - I want to switch to Mac soon, so - Apple - behave and have some compassion - not the pretense compassion you display in your TV ads. Funny side note is that the actor playing 'I'm a PC' has built quite some rapport with the viewer ship that was intended to only laugh at him.

Take a look (or hear) the BoingBoing podcast with John Hodgman.

But anyway, Jeff Han's demo of his multi touch interface can give us an idea of the next thing to come out of Apple - a tablet with that kind of interface - would that be cool?

Let's just postulate that they don't go the same wrong route as some gurus that during their rise started to believe all they were telling was exclusively theirs - sure thing for a downfall.