Just a few hours ago, Apple announced a much-rumored new product - the MacBook Air. If you have not already seen the news, the Air is basically a 13.3″ MacBook Pro that is really thin.

The past 48 hours have been filled with drama for me. My MacBook Pro died on March 15, forcing me to scramble for help from Apple while I shifted all of my blogging and business efforts over to a System76's Pangolin Performance laptop running Ubuntu. The experience reminded me: Ubuntu fills a growing niche where (A) Apple won't compete on price and (B) Microsoft hasn't competed on quality.

With the problems of Vista, the end of the availability of XP, and the lack of Apple to see the light and open up OS X to non-Apple hardware, much is expected of the next release of the most popular consumer Linux distribution.

Apple has long had a history of being arrogant. But, more often than not, they've been able to back it up by the quality of their products. But now, with Apple locking out Adobe Flash and Google Ads, not to mention their cute trick of setting up an HTML 5 demo site that only works with Apple's own Safari Web browser, I think Apple has overstepped their authority.

New evidence that shows Apple's poor attitude towards openness/freedom

Apple's action in the face of GPL violations speaks volumes about the company's attitude

Apple has retention issues with users due to excessive lock-in and control; Snow Leopard suffers from more bugs

Apple and Linux advocate IBM both tried hard to cramp Microsoft's style this week before the Windows 7 rollout even got under way. On Tuesday, Apple launched a new iMac, MacBook, and Mac Mini line, while IBM joined with Linux distributor Canonical to introduce a new "cloud-and-Linux-based" offering called IBM Client for Smart Work.

As this site has noted, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth at OSCON called for Linux distributions to leapfrog the quality of Apple’s Mac OS X user experience. Here’s how the Linux industry can fulfill that vision.