Dear Friends,

The course of the latest storm changed just enough to change Artie’s “Nor’incher” into some substantial snow fall for Vermont. While our headquarters in Waitsfield received just under a foot of snow (meaning our internal contest for the first foot of snow in 24 hours is still alive), I found two and a half feet at my house, and I cleaned off the deck before settling down to watch the Celtics.

The big news that was not news this week was the expansion of the iPhone onto the Verizon CDMA network. We all knew this was coming and it is a great opportunity for Apple to expand the iPhone market (which has the by-product of expanding the Mac market, too). Apple’s Mac market share continues to grow, and according to the latest reports, is now just under 10%. Even more interesting is a report from Durban Capital that says in the period of January through October of 2010 that 60-65% of the entire growth in consumer spending went to Apple.

It will be interesting to see how the competition between AT&T and Verizon shapes up for the iPhone. While Verizon seems to enjoy a customer satisfaction advantage right now in terms of service and signal, the enormous load that the iPhone will bring to their network will also pose challenges. Out at the Consumer Electronics Show, AT&T was so overloaded by the thousands of iPhones attempting to use their network that it was nearly impossible to make a call, text or surf. It was not a great show for AT&T and if I were in that position, I would have brought in new bandwidth to cover the show.

The most telling thing to report about CES was that despite Apple not being at the show, they dominated the show. Many (or maybe most) of the exhibitors were either showing products to work with Apple products or showing products intended to compete with Apple products. There were so many iPad cases, iPhone cases, iPod docks and tablets at the show that one would have thought it was Macworld. We had a successful show and made a lot of new contacts for our Chill Pill Audio and Hammerhead products.