Steve Gillmor: the weekend's skeptics were silenced.

Never bet against the Scobleizer! Heh!

If you missed all the Apple news (or, were, like me, partying on the Thames in London) Dave Winer links to a few things.

We're off to visit Microsoft Research in Cambridge today. See ya at the geek dinner tonight.

To understand why Steve Jobs fired IBM you need to look no further than the Lenovo Thinkpad T41 Tablet PC. The Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming! And you thought Dell was hard to compete with.

Why do I say all this? Because the Lenovo outsexes. Out powers. Is lighter weight. Is better designed than any current Apple portable.

Huh?

Well, when you see it, you'll understand what I'm talking about. First of all, Lenovo is the company that bought IBM's Thinkpad brand.

First question, do they still have the industry's best keyboard on a portable device? Yes!

Is it the industry's lightest convertible Tablet PC? Yes! (3.3 pounds).

What's the battery life? Somewhere around six hours.

Why do I say it's better designed? It's thin. It has a great rubberized grip. It is black. It is beautiful.

It also has a really cool new fingerprint reader so you don't need to enter passwords for most things anymore.

But, it all comes down to performance. This new machine is using a very fast Intel processor that uses very little power, and generates very little heat.

That's something that IBM wasn't able to give Steve Jobs and it made Jobs furious, according to my sources.

So, today, Apple is switching from IBM processors to Intel ones. And now you know the rest of the story.

Con on the Lenovo? Screen resolution. They are still running 1024x768. My Toshiba has 1400x1050 and there's a new Toshiba that is running 1600x1200.

But, this new ThinkPad is gonna finally let me get folks like Dave Winer and Buzz Bruggeman onto a Tablet PC. For that I'm very happy.