Update: Apple ups the ante with Mac mini, iPod, and Xsan

You may also wish to use Mac mini on your desk as a fast, sexy, and silent replacement for your boring PC. For your convenience, Apple made sure that PC keyboards, mice, and monitors will just plug right in. The fact that this box is just a little bigger than an adult's hand suggests that it can hop from the desk to the entertainment center. It's more likely that it will just stay put in the den, where an LCD or plasma display will do double duty as a computer display and a movie screen. Apple will undoubtedly make just the right display for this task.

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This all has a very consumer-ish flavor to it, but Sony has a good reason to worry. A 400 GB FireWire drive is now the equivalent of a massive HD tape. PowerBook is an HD field editing unit, Power Mac is a production workstation and Mac mini is a digital delivery device. The pro-level digital video recorders and players, the $5,000 to $50,000 devices that are the soul of Sony's business, aren't part of this scenario. Steve Jobs' show on stage with the Sony camcorder was his way of saying, "This is the only part we'll leave to you." The cheap as dirt iLife, which is bundled with Mac mini, does world-class DVD authoring as well. Apple will own as much of the video market as it decides to take.

To watch this play out on a smaller scale, keep an eye on the fate of the dozens of companies that sell flash memory MP3 players. Apple’s $99 iPod Shuffle will automatically pick the songs you like best that fit in its memory. Apple targeted the flash music player market not to participate in it, but to wipe it out.

A rush briefing assembled the day before Macworld Expo showed that Microsoft gets that message, too. Office has always been Microsoft's way of taking a chunk out of every Mac client sale. Steve Jobs announced the Jan. 22 release of iWork, a package combining a new word processor cum page layout program called Pages and a reworking of Apple's presentation app, dubbed Keynote 2. Pages isn't Word and it isn't Quark, but it is enough and it makes everyone who uses it look like an artist. Keynote 2 isn't as extensive as PowerPoint, but with the addition of placeable, animated graphics, it covers the needs of most PowerPoint users.

The e-mail client in Tiger is much improved, easily strong enough to knock Microsoft's Entourage off most non-corporate systems. That leaves Microsoft stuck in the position of selling a spreadsheet to the bulk of the Mac market. Thanks, Microsoft. Apple will take it from here. And incidentally, Keynote 2 is also the simplest and most intuitive Flash authoring environment I've seen.

Apple seemed to steal its own thunder by releasing its IT news -- the delivery of 2.3 GHz Xserve G5, 5.6TB Xserve RAID, and Xsan  -- before Macworld Expo. But even that served a purpose. Before Sony took the stage, Apple rolled out a server product line that amounts to a one-stop collaborative digital video production and animation solution. And before Microsoft called its hurried press conference to announce that it's working closely with Apple, Apple dropped the hint that it can use the very same gear to make an aggressive run at the PC server and storage market. That is, if it chooses to. Maybe, maybe not. Ask again tomorrow.

Apple can't be assured of control of every market it targets, but it can be certain of one thing: No one else will control its participation in its chosen markets again. Wherever Apple chooses to go, it will go alone, and that should scare the hell out of any company that has to sell against it.