Thanks for the link love. I disagree about the validity of Bill Palmer's points. That Apple doesn't manufacture a cheap display doesn't mean Apple can't sell one: There's a whole page of displays, starting at $189, on the online Apple store, and nothing stops them from selling those in the retail stores, as well.

Palmer says the typical switcher candidate's "aging piece of junk 15 inch CRT monitor is just about to die": As far as I can tell, those things just don't die. My parents are using a 5+ year old VGA monitor with their 3rd consecutive PC, while the last standalone CRT in my house has been on 7 x 24 (sleeping through Energy Star, of course) for more than 5 years (it's a Sony 17").

Maybe history will show Bill Palmer is right (it's never happened yet, so far as I can tell), but I can tell you that Apple has sold a lot of product in the last 48 hours: My Mac mini is shipping in 3-4 weeks, where on Tuesday, it would have been delivered by Jan. 22nd. A friend in Colorado went to get an iPod shuffle Tuesday night, and got wait-listed. My creative director has already dropped $200+ on a shuffle, iLife and iWork. Perhaps once the fawning fan-boys get their stuff, demand will dry up, but I doubt it.

Net net on Bill Palmer: He's got cognitive dissonance, big time, and he admits it: "Did I make a mistake? Absolutely. I made the mistake of believing that Apple would never do something as groundbreakingly stupid as what it did today."

Thanks for the comments!

To clarify, the only point I agreed with was the problem of people who go into a physical Apple Store to buy a Mac mini but find only high-end Apple monitors. I mistakenly used a plural but have corrected it now. I found the rest of his rant to be full of flawed logic and inexplicable vitriol