And so the journey to Macworld Expo San Francisco 2007 begins. It always seems to start in an airport, doesn’t it? I noticed something rather enlightening here at the airport this morning. My house is equidistant (there’s a math word that I don’t get to use often enough in the real world) from the Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach airports, meaning that not only do I generally have twice as many flights to choose from as someone else might, I also get to look for things that might make one airport more attractive to me than the other. Earlier this year I discovered a biggie: FLL became one of the few airports I’m aware of to offer totally free wireless internet access in the terminals. It’s not just that it saves the ten bucks that I’d have to pay to get online at PBI, it’s also a matter of having to pull out my credit card in a public place, type in the number, etc., for what almost always ends up being less than an hour’s use.
I figure FLL decided to do this because it was trying to gain a competitive advantage over PBI (and for that matter, Miami airport, which is too far away from me to be plausible but competes with FLL on the south side nonetheless). As a result, I’ve leaned toward FLL when booking flights for awhile now, and in fact today is the first time it ended up where the flight I could get out of PBI was a tangibly better option, causing me to choose it over FLL (altough the fact that I’ve been up since 4:00 this morning means that neither airport had anything reasonable to offer this particular time around). So I get here this morning and it turns out that PBI now also offers free wireless internet.
I love competition.
You know, I look around the airport, and I’m seeing what I always see: a mix of Mac and PC laptops, always in a different ratio, usually more PCs than Macs but so many more Macs than even a year or two ago. And of course, enough iPods to start some kind of cult. You know what I don’t see? Zunes. Not a single one. In fact, it just occurred to me that in the month or two the Microsoft Zune has been on the market, the only place I’ve ever seen one is in the store.
Flight’s boarding. More soon. Not sure where my next entry will come from, but it won’t be from Florida.
(can’t wait to meet the MyMac folks!)
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