It's been a telling couple of days in the decades-long Battle of the Brands that is Microsoft versus Apple.
First Microsoft announced the Surface Studio, an all-in-one, touch-screen PC that we can't wait to get our hands on here in the Digital Life Labs.
We are already thinking it might be our Most Exciting Product of The Year (either that or GoPro's Karma video drone), and a lot of our colleagues in the gadget review business are exclaiming "I totally don't need one, but I totally want one".
This may be the sign of a good product, or it may be the sign of a white elephant, it's hard to tell.
And then Apple announced the new MacBook Pro, a notebook computer that featured the Touch Bar, a reprogammable array of touch-sensitive buttons, most certainly the best reprogammable array of touch-sensitive buttons in the long and sorry history of reprogammable touch-sensitive button arrays.
It has a lot of people wondering why Apple doesn't just admit it's wrong about touch-screens, that it has fallen far behind the curve, and just add a touch-screen to its Macs instead.
It's an odd sensation, the feeling that Apple is falling behind the technology curve at the same time that Microsoft, under its new(ish) CEO Satya Nadella, is finally getting out in front of it.
Natural order out of whack
It was never thus, and it was never meant to be thus, either. It's not the natural order of things.
But if the Surface Studio proves to be even half as good as it looks (we're yet to get our hands on any of this gear, by the way), that will be three years in a row when Microsoft has come up with an absolutely cracking new product.
First there was the Surface Pro 3, then the Surface Book, and now the Surface Studio. It's hard to think of any other company doing that.
If Surface were a brand all on its own, you'd say it was a great one. But then there's the other stuff Microsoft is doing.
There's the HoloLens mixed-reality headset, a product so audacious that it actually appears to be a little too far ahead of the technology curve.
It is waiting for hardware to catch up, so mixed reality can happen in its full field of view, rather than limited to a small window in front of the viewer.
And there's the stuff that Microsoft has been doing around Windows 10, that's not quite so thrilling, but that shows that the venerable company has become agile at a time when Apple appears to be getting sluggish.
The iPhone is now on a three-year overhaul cycle at a time when Apple's major competitor in phones, Samsung, is overhauling its flagship phones every year. Who'd have thought?
Chasing influential customers
Though of course, recent explosions suggest that it is possible to move too fast.
Windows 10 is on a rapid, free-of-charge update cycle, based around the Windows Insider program designed to ensure that Microsoft focuses on features that users actually want, rather than ones they don't want.
And Windows 10 is aggressively pursuing the sort of influential customer who used to be steadfastly in the Apple camp.
It now has a Linux subsystem built right into it, that for this web app developer at least makes Windows my platform of choice for the first time ever.
Touch-screens and digital pens on Windows 10 notebooks are appealing to graphics artists, who have to abandon their MacBooks and step down to an iPad Pro if they want those features on an Apple.
Yes, Microsoft is surging past Apple in so many ways, in just about every way except the one that matters the most. Phones.
That nut even Nadella can't crack.
