So I’d say Apple pretty much killed it today
And by ‘it’ I mean Blockbuster (and possibly Netflix but they’re a bit more agile). If weren’t one of the gazillion people hitting on the Engadget and Gizmodo live blogs Apple released a bunch of new shise today.
The MacBook Air will get most of the attention but I think Movie Rentals is a bigger deal because it revives the Apple TV as their stake in the living room. Think of all the companies that had (have) an in but have funked it up, Microsoft and Sony have the XBox and PS3, and were so preoccupied with the blue-ray HDDVD war they didn’t even think of adding a Movie Rental service into their boxes. If any one at Blockbuster had half a clue they would have been begging Microsoft/Sony to help them deliver movies over the net and into a gaming box. Instead Blockbuster can only see Netflix as its main competitor and copies their service while Apple sneaks past both of them.
Flickr on Apple TV is pretty cool too, I was *this* close to signing up for SmugMug account over Flickr pro literally two days ago (price and smugmug’s craptastic templates were the deciders then).