In my first ever video review, I take a look at Airlock. A utility that uses the proximity of your bluetooth enabled iPhone or iPod touch to lock/unlock you Mac. I highly recommend it, and you can get your copy for $7.77 at themha.com.
Market research firm NPD has released their 2009 Household Penetration Study, other than sounding dirty, the study shows that 12% of computer-owning households have a Mac (compared to 9% last year). This sounds excellent until you factor in that nearly 85% of those Mac-owning households also have at least one Windows PC.
Multiple computer ownership is a common thread in Apple computer households, with 66 percent of households owning three or more computers, compared to just 29 percent of Windows PC households. Apple owning households are decidedly more mobile as well, with 72 percent of them owning a notebook, whereas only 50 percent of households that have a Windows PC own a notebook.
The study goes on to say that Mac households have a tendency to be more affluent than other households, and often own many different kinds of consumer electronics devices, and nearly twice as many of them, as the regular household.
The study wraps up by suggesting that because Apple housholds are on the bleeding edge, they may be an accurate measurement of upcoming trends in the consumer electronics industry.
This makes sense. Only until recently, my household owned an Windows PC in addition to our iMac. I think this shows that more and more people are looking at the Mac, but are hesitant to completely transition over to the platform.
Also, these numbers indicate what the rest of us already knew; Apple is sucking the cream off the top of the computer and consumer electronics industries, while also gaining market share. By targeting the affluent first, Apple has managed to create an elitist perception of the brand, creating desire. Now that they appear elite, market share is rising, and Mac prices are falling to persuade the less affluent to switch, all while gaining market share along the way. Or at least that’s how I see it.
Have an opinion? Leave a comment!
Chart courtesy of NPD.
MacRumors is reporting on a recent note from esearch analyst Mike Abramsky to his clients elaborating on results from a series of RBC IQ/ChangeWave survey questions that show increased Mac and iPhone sales momentum, and a strong consumer interest in an Apple tablet.
In the survey 25% of consumers were purchasing Mac. This is up from 18% in July, and as Abramsky speculates may be due to recent price cuts and Apple’s back-to-school program. Other reasons the Mac may be gaining momentum include: spillover from the iPhone, the Snow Leopard launch, increased brand awareness, and improved consumer electronic sales.
As for the iPhone, a massive 30% of smartphone owners chose iPhone, that’s up from 25% in June. RBC is projecting iPhone will take 2% of global, mobile phone sales, that is a whopping 22.8 million devices. They also expect those numbers to rise to 54.7 million or 4% of the market by 2012.
The survey wraps up with a question regarding a hypothetical Apple tablet device in the $500-$700 price range. A significant 21% of buyers showed interest in just such a device. This compares to just 9% interest in the iPhone prior to it’s 2007 launch.
Story and images courtesy of MacRumors.
Apple has announced profits of $1.23 Billion for Q3 2009. Apple stated they had $8.34 billion in revenue and net quarterly profit of $1.23 billion, or $1.35 per diluted share. Compare this to the year-ago quarter results of $7.46 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.07 billion, or $1.19 per diluted share, and you see a substantial jump.
All of this money was generated from Apple shipping 2.6 million Macintosh computers (a 4% increase over the year-ago quarter), 10.2 million iPods (7% decline from year-ago quarter), and 5.2 million iPhones (a massive 626% increase over last year).
“We’re making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re thrilled to have sold over 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter and users have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications from our App Store in its first year.”
Apple expects total revenue of $8.7 billion to $8.9 billion and earnings per diluted share of $1.18 to $1.23, for fiscal quarter 4 of 2009.
The WWDC Keynote has just ended. Some exciting things were announced today, and I like to run through them with you now.
All Aluminum MacBooks are now under the MacBook Pro brand.
- MacBook Pro 13″ now starts at $1199.
- MacBook Pro 15″ now starts at $1699
- MacBook Air now starts at $1499
MacBooks received upgrades.
- Macbook Pro 13″: FireWire800, SD card slot and extended battery life. Base model 2.26GHz 2GB RAM, 160HD.
- Macbook Pro 15″: Standard base configuration of 2.53GHz, 4GB RAM, 250GB HD. Up to 3.06CPU, 8GB of RAM, 500GB HD or 256GB SSD
- MacBook Pro 17″: One configuration 2.8GHz CPU, 500GB HD, ExpressCard Slot remains.
- Macbook Air: Up to 2.13GHz CPU
Safari 4 out of beta. Available today for all platforms. (Tiger, Leopard, Vista)
Snow Leopard has a bunch of new features and improvements:
- Improved Expose
- OpenCl (uses graphics card computing power to improve system wide performance)
- Grand Central Dispatch (helps applications better use Multi-core processors)
- New version of Quicktime called Quictime X
- Refined 90% of core OS,
- Exchange support
- Better “Stacks” navigation
- Due for release in September
Snow Leopard is an Intel only release, will be available for $29, “near finial” developer build released today.
Here is a complete list of Snow Leopard enhancements.
- iPhone 3.0 is a major release with 100+ new features including cut/copy/paste, landscape keyboard mode in Mail/Notes/Messages, Search, etc
- 1000+ new API’s for developers. In-app purchases, Peer to Peer connectivity, etc
- iTunes enhancements: now able to rent and purchase movies from phone. Purchase TV shows, music, and audiobooks.
- Tethering
- Improved/faster Safari
- Improved language support
- Hardware accessories can work through the Dock connector or Bluetooth
- MobileMe Find My iPhone and Remote Wipe
- Voice Memos
iPhone OS 3.0 will be available for free to all iPhone owners (3G and original). $9.99 for iPod Touch owners, and will be available to the public, June 17th.
A new iPhone, the iPhone 3GS, S standing for speed. Was this really a shock?
- All new internals
- 2.1x faster to launch Messages, 2.4x to load SimCity, 3.6x faster to load an Excel attachment, 2.9x faster to load a large website.
- Supports OpenGL|ES 2.0
- Supports 7.2Mbps HSPDA
- 3MP auto-focus camera with the ability to tap to focus, automatically handles white balance, low light sensitivity, auto-macro as close as 10cm away.
- Video recording. Camera application has a switch that lets you change between still photo and video mode. 30FPS, VGA with audio, all the same features of still images, white-balance, exposure, etc.
- Voice control. Hold down the home button for a second and a voice control interface is brought up. Say things like “Call Scott Forstall” if there are more than one entries, it will ask which one you want (home, office, etc) or control music “play The Killers”
- You can also ask “what’s playing now?” and it will tell you. Or say “play more songs like this” and a genius playlist will be built.
- Digital Compass. Shows your orientation, integration with Maps, if you double click, the map will re-orientate itself.
- Better accessibility
- Nike+ support
- Better battery life. 9 hours of internet surfing, 10 hours of video, 30 hours of audio, 12 hours of 2g talk-time, 5 hours of 3g talk-time.
- Available in white and black on June 19th. Being launched in US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, UK, with more to come this summer.
- Comes in two configurations: 16GB for $199 and 32GB for $299
Apple’s iPhone 3GS tech specs can be found here. I’ll fill you in the second I know more about the amount of RAM and processor speed in this new iPhone.
Apple is holding onto the 8GB iPhone 3G (my guess is to deplete inventory) it will sell for $99.
It also looks like there is no “upgrade pricing” from AT&T for current iPhone 3G owners.
Pictures courtesy of Apple
This article will be updated as more information develops.
It is reported that Apple has began sending emails to MobileMe subscribers warning of a service change taking effect this July. The change is the removal of old .Mac tools such as Homepage, and Groups.
If you are still using Groups all accompanying features are disappearing as well, such as group emails, group Homepages, message boards, and iDisk “Groups” folder. If you still have data in a iDisk groups folder, you don’t have to worry. Apple has stated that they are moving the “Groups” folders to a new folder on your iDisk named “Groups Archive”.
All of this takes effect on July 7th, 2009.
I have known for some time that if you are lucky enough to live close to an Apple retail store that you can go there and get lessons on how to use Apple products. I always thought that was a great thing if you happened to live near one. I do not.
This weekend I was shopping for some new electronics and stopped in at best buy. As i was browsing through the store I saw a large Apple display. I made the assumption it was a product promotion or something and kept shopping.
Well as I got closer to the display I realized there where several people gathered around and there was almost every Apple hardware product represented. I inquired a bit further and found that Best Buy was actually holding Apple training sessions for Mac users. They had a schedule of topics so you can plan to attend a subject of interest to you.
This day they where doing a fairly in depth training on how to use Garage Band.
I do not know if this is occurring at all best buy stores but if you live in an area where an Apple store is not close by then give Best Buy a try and you may be able to pick up some free training.
Today Aspyr and Activison announced Guitar Hero World Tour for the Mac and Windows. So if you are a gamer but not into consoles, you just have to wait until this summer to have in your hands this popular game. The game will be rated “T” for teens by the ESRB.
About the controllers, it seems that they’ll be introducing them for the first time: “Guitar Hero World Tour for PC and Mac offers state-of-the-art wireless controllers to computer gamers for the first time”. And about the compatibility with console controllers, there is no word yet, so we’ll have to wait until summer.
So in conclusion:
- Coming out summer ’09.
- Controllers for Mac/PC being introduced.
- Rated “T” for teens by ESRB.
- Unknown if console controllers will be compatible.
- Taken from their site: “New online and offline gameplay modes and a Music Studio feature for composing and editing original rock and roll anthems. Guitar Hero World Tour is the most complete music game to-date with 86 on-disc tracks from music legends”.
And finally something interesting from the announcement:
“Guitar Hero World Tour is the standard for music games on consoles and we can’t wait to unleash this incredible experience on computer gamers,” said Ted Staloch, Executive Vice President, Aspyr Media. “With full band play, support for the new wireless controllers, the ability to create their own music and an amazing array of customization options, Guitar Hero World Tour will be the definitive music game on PC and Mac. We are proud to once again be working with Activision to extend this powerful brand to an eager audience of gamers.”
Apple saw a 16% year-over-year drop in Mac sales compared to February 2008, acording to this article by AppleInsider. It goes on to say that iPod sales also dropped 16%. These numbers are expected to rebound because of the recent refreshes to the iMac, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini, and iPod Shuffle product lines. Apple shipped 2.289 million Macs last March quarter. It is expected to be anywhere from 2 to 2.2 million Macs sold this quarter.
This news comes as no surprise due to the current economic climate. What does come as a surprise is still relativly strong sales of Apple’s products during this fiscal mess. As of now, It appears Apple will weather this mess fairly well.
I’ve had my iMac for a long while now. One big problem that I always run into is I delete the .dmg install files to programs on my machine. Sometimes the only way to correctly uninstall applications on your mac is to run the .dmg file that you installed them from. There has to be an easier way to do this.
Sponge is an application that allows you to easily uninstall and delete any files that are associated with any application that is installed on your Mac. The thing that I love the most about this app is how easy it is to use.
When you first open Sponge you will notice it finding all the applications you have installed on your mac. From this point you can select which program you wish to get rid of and it will prompt you to select all the files it thinks are associated with the application. This works wonderfully; I deleted a couple of games that I no longer played with a few clicks and there were files from it all over my HDD. Sponge does not stop at just uninstalling apps though…
Sponge also has a feature called “Sweep Disk Hogs”. This feature will do a full sweep of all the folders on your HDD, or any destination you select. As it sweeps, it will tell you which folders are taking up the most space on your Mac. This tool is very useful if you are running low on Hard Disk Space.
The final feature of Sponge allows you to find any duplicate files on your Mac and allows you to delete them right from the application. Out of the three features I found this one to be the least useful because it tended to find duplicates that weren’t duplicates at all (so make sure you look twice before deleting).
Sponge for Mac is available at sponge-mac.com. It is available for $26 (free trial available) and I highly suggest it for any Mac user that wants to properly uninstall applications on their machines.
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