Apple - page 34

Don’t believe the negative hype. Apple’s much-maligned new iMac, which is supposedly suffering from screen issues and delays, was largely responsible for the company’s record hardware sales in Q1 2010.

Since their launch in October, the new machines have been dogged by reports of delays and problems, including cracked screens, inconsistent color and flashing video. Especially problematic was the 27-inch model, which Gizmodo dubbed the “Yellow iMac” for a reportedly widespread yellow screen tint.

However, Apple said Q1 desktop sales were up 70 percent year-over-year (a 60 percent increase in revenue), thanks largely to the new iMacs. During an analyst conference call, Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer and Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook said customers are “thrilled” with the new iMacs.

Apple saw record Mac sales of 3.36 million units during the quarter, beating the previous best quarter (September) by more than 300,000 machines (up 33% year-over-year).

Broken down, Mac sales were 2.128 million portables and 1.234 million desktops. Portable sales were also up, but by 18 percent year over year,

“We are extremely proud of this result and believe our Mac hardware and software are providing outstanding software and innovation that our customers really love,” Oppenheimer said.

Read our orgasmic review of the 27-inch iMac here.

With rumors swirling that Apple this week may announce the end of its exclusive contract with AT&T, Apple COO Tim Cook defended the much-vilified company.

During Apple’s Q1 financial conference call, Cook acknowledged AT&T had “issues” in some cities, but had worked out a plan to fix them. The plan was drawn with Apple’s approval and cooperation.

Said Cook:

“AT&T is a great partner. You know, we’ve been working with them since before the first iPhone. In the vast majority of locations, they provide a great experience. But there have been issues in some cities. They have acknowledged this and developed a plan to make things better and we have personally reviewed them.”

Cook said he has “very high confidence” that AT&T’s issues can be resolved.

Via Digital Daily.

Apple’s first quarter of 2010 was another blockbuster, and Steve Jobs is talking about a major new product this week that he’s “really excited about.”

In financial results reported Monday, Apple says it earned “all-time highest revenues and profits.” The company made revenues of $15.68 billion and profits of $3.38 billion on sales of 3.36 million Macs and 8.7 million iPhones.

“If you annualize our quarterly revenue, it’s surprising that Apple is now a $50+ billion company,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, in a statement. “The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about.”

Everything except sales of iPods (which are down 8%) is in record territory   — iPhone sales are up 100% and Macs up 33%.

Here are the highlights:

* 3.36 million Macs sold (33% unit increase over year-ago quarter).

* 8.7 million iPhones sold (100% unit growth).

* 21 million iPods sold (8% unit decline).

* $15.68 billion revenue ($11.88 billion in the year-ago quarter).

* $3.38 billion net quarterly profit, or $3.67 per diluted share. ($2.26 billion, or $2.50 per diluted share, last year).

* 40.9% gross margin was (37.9 percent in the year-ago quarter).

* International sales accounted for 58 percent of revenue.

Apple’s a money machine. The 41% gross margin is unbelievable, especially in a recession. Competitors atre lucky to make 5% margins.

It’s also worth noting that a big bump in revenue came from Apple’s adoption of new accounting practices. Revenue from sales of iPhones and Apple TVs are now recognized immediately, rather than being spread over two years. Apple used subscription accounting for iPhones and Apple TVs so that it could provide free software upgrades without running afoul of accounting rules.

Apple’s shown some commitment to Haitian Earthquake Relief Efforts by making it easy for iTunes users to donate to the Red Cross, but according to one Genius Bar employee, this commitment doesn’t extend to letting its employees rush off to Santiagio to help facilitate relief efforts: he was fired for his troubles.

Here’s some sensible tablet speculation from UK app developer Dave Hornsby of Chilli X.

A levelheaded Englishman, Hornsby reckons the tablet will be a big iPod touch running iPhone OS 4.0, which is basically the iPhone OS with support for larger screen sizes.

Hornsby doesn’t have any special knowledge of what Steve Jobs will release next week. He’s just thinking aloud. Here’s his reasoning:

“It won’t be running Snow Leopard – there’s no point putting the same operating system that people use to do high end rendering and print ready artwork on a small, less powerful device. If it was to run Snow Leopard then Apple would have to figure out a way of stopping you installing certain types of application and that’s just messy.

It won’t run the current iPhone operating system either, although it will run most existing iPhone apps in smaller windows (almost like OS X dashboard widgets). My guess is that they’ll use the event to announce iPhone OS 4.0 with lots of cool new features including support for larger screen sizes. It makes perfect sense – everyone loves the iPhone OS. Users because it’s slick, fun and easy to use and Apple because of all the money they make from the App Store – why would they want to use Snow Leopard and not be able to control what software goes on there (and get a cut of it).”

Hornsby figured it would be fun to imagine what his iPhone apps would look like blown up to tablet size. See the fantastic mockups above.

“Imagine what we could do with all these extra pixels,” says Hornsby. “So we’ve used some of our existing apps as a starting point and mocked up these images showing the type of app we’d like to build. Imagine a combination of PhotoFrame, DeskClock and PlaySafe – what do you think?”

Gary Snyder, a 79-year-old poet with roots in the Beat scene, lives in the tranquility of the Sierra Nevada foothills. He doesn’t spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and he hasn’t heard about the existence of the Apple tablet.

But he loves his Mac.

John Markoff of the New York Times got in touch with Snyder to chat about the latest from Apple, but what he got out of it was a new lens on the world. Or at least computing. Snyder allowed the Times to reprint, with permission, his poem “Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh.” You’ve got to head over to read the full thing, but just consider this line:

Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,

And it winks when it goes out,

Could not say it better myself. Is it Wednesday yet?

Our friend Seth Weintraub at 9to5Mac has written a great curtain raiser on the upcoming tablet. His lengthy posts covers everything you ever wanted to know about the tablet, including the likely surprises.

We especially like the way he starts by recalling the way Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone:

At the introduction of the iPhone, Steve Jobs touted that new device as a “Widescreen iPod”, “Revolutionary Mobile Phone” and “Breakthrough Internet Communications Device”.

I believe the same type of convergence thinking is going into the tablet. It can’t just be a “Kindle-killer” eBook reader. It can’t just be a “Media Pad”. It can’t be only a Nintendo DS or PSP competitor. It can’t just be a small NetBook-sized MacBook either. It has to be all of these things. At the same time. Say it together:

“The best eBook reader. The best Netbook. And the best portable media player and gaming device.”

Repeat.

Well worth reading the entire thing.

Unable to contain his excitement about the upcoming tablet, German blogger Richard Gutjahr has created 10 mock movie posters featuring the tablet, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer and other Silicon Valley stars.

There’s a couple more of Gutjah’s posters after the jump. The full “Top 10 Apple Tablet Movies (…yet to be made)” can be found on Richard’s blog.

Good news, not-so-good news on the tablet, according to a “double-sourced” story from iLounge:

Good News: The tablet will have two dock connectors, one on the bottom edge, the other on the side for charging/docking in both portrait and landscape mode. “… accessory companies have struggled for the past three years to figure out ways to accommodate Cover Flow and the like in their speakers and docks,” says iLounge EIC Jeremy Horwitz. “Two Dock Connectors fixes this, and depending on how Apple handles multiple accessory connections, could have some other nice benefits, as well.”

Horwitz also notes the tablet with an aluminum backplate with a wide plastic strip to enable clear radio reception for the device’s wireless antennae. The size of the strip “suggests room for nice-sized antennas, and 802.11n compatibility,” says Horwitz.

Not So Good News: The tablet will be offered with optional cell service, iLounge reckons, with data plans in the $30-$60 per month range. Curiously, iLounge thinks AT&T might offer a combined iPhone and tablet plan to attract  users already paying monthly iPhone data fees.

Savant Systems is a home automation company that sells a range of wireless control tablets that may illustrate how Apple’s tablet will work in the real world.

Unlike the endless mockups and magazine-publisher demos, Savant’s line of Rosie Touch systems are real products.

Based on OS X, the Rosie Touch panels control the home’s heating, lighting, security and entertainment systems. They run an iPhone-like touch interface based on a photo-realistic model of the house’s interior. Built on pictures of the actual home, the UI allows users to control the lights and AV components by interacting with pictures of the actual components onscreen.

In other words, tap the hallway light onscreen, and the actual hallway light turns on or off. Slide your finger down the picture of the kitchen window, and the blinds in the kitchen are drawn down.

More than 20% of Apple fans would buy the upcoming tablet “sight unseen,” according to a poll by 9to5Mac.

That’s a pretty big number, given that the tablet might turn out to be a Jobsian brainfart like the Cube.

But then again, Apple does have a great record of innovative products.

The majority of 9to5Mac readers say they’ll likely buy the tablet (33%), but wait until they see it before parting with their cash.

Only 6% of the 7,454 voter said they wouldn’t buy the tablet.

9to5Mac’s poll is here: Are you gonna buy one of them Apple tablets?

My inamorata likes, on occasion, to wistfully pine for an alternate reality in which her grade school predictions of Apple’s future success had been funded by a benign patriarch and made her a plutocrat. Instead, she got a cynical ‘C’ from her teacher for her “implausible” stock pick, and now blames this woman every day for her daily diet of bread crusts and dry Ramen.

The point is, it’s foolish to bet against Apple’s stock rising, but could analyst Gene Munster be taking it to far? He told Henry Blodget at The Business Insider that Apple stock could someday be worth $1,000 per share.

Munster’s reasoning is that Apple is well underway towards being the global smartphone leader and that Cupertino will be able to maintain its incredible growth rate. As the iPhone gets cheaper over time, there’s room for explosive growth. In the meantime, Apple seems ready to revisit its iPhone success with the forthcoming Tablet, which will expand Apple’s media profits in bold new directions.

Understandably, it seems like people took Munster’s comments as a reason to pick up Apple stock, as it closed at an all-time high yesterday of $215.04 per share. If you’ve got a few bucks rubbing together, you may as well get in: it’s just only going to go higher.

The iPhone OS 4.0 will feature multitasking (the ability to run apps in the background), multitouch gestures system-wide, and several changes to the UI, according to Boy Genius Report, citing “one of our trusty Apple connects.”

According to BGR, the update to the iPhone OS, which may come as soon as the special Apple next Wednesday, will include:

There will be multi-touch gestures OS-wide. (Would make sense for that as the rumored OS for the iTablet is close if not the same as the iPhone)

“A few new ways” to run applications in the background — multitasking.

Many graphical and UI changes to make navigating through the OS easier and more efficient. We haven’t had this broken down, but we can only hope for improved notifications, a refreshed homescreen, etc.

The update will supposedly be available for only the iPhone 3G and 3GS, but will “put them ahead in the smartphone market because it will make them more like full-fledged computers” more than any other phone to date. Everyone is “really excited.”

The last piece of information is the most vague, but apparently there will be some brand new syncing ability for the contacts and calendar applications.

Half of this is pretty vague, but the UI changes to make the OS “easier and more efficient,” ring true. One of the biggest complaints against Google’s Android is the occasionally kludgy interface. Version 4.0 of the iPhone OS is a major milestone — and it sounds like it’ll be miles ahead of anything else out there.

This post originally appeared on our friend Graham Bower’s Mac Predictions blog. Graham’s post is pure speculation — but a good read nonetheless.

Take a sheet of letter paper and fold it in half. You’re holding something about the size of Apple’s new iSlate. Imagine that scrap of paper is a beautiful, shiny combination of glass, aluminum and plastic, weighing about 10 ounces. How does it feel?

The first thing you’ll notice is that, unlike the iPhone, you want to hold it with both hands. And this presents a bit of a problem. You don’t have a hand free to touch the screen.Your thumbs are resting on the edges of the device, and are not long enough or manoeuvrable enough to reach the middle. Your fingers, however, are idly stretched across the back of the device.

And this gives us the clue we need to suspect that there’s some truth the rumors doing the rounds that Apple’s working on a multi touch surface for the back of a new iPhone. But perhaps it’s destined for the new tablet, instead (or as well). More than just a gimmick, this all-new input method would enable users to interact with the device without moving their hands from its sides. It also has the benefit of enabling you to use the device without obscuring the screen with your hands.

Next week, Apple will either officially unveil their much-rumored tablet device, or the lot of us are going to look like complete idiots. Either way, it should be a fun week, but as anticipation boils to a pitch, we might as well keep ourselves entertained with a look back at the prehistory of Apple’s last tablet launch: three Newton prototypes evocatively codenamed the Bic, the Cadillac and the Batmobile.

Preliminary United States PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 4Q09 (Thousands of Units)

Note: Data includes desk-based PCs, mobile PCs and X86 servers.
Source: Gartner (January 2010)

Apple’s Mac shipments grew 24% in Q4 2009, riding the industry’s strongest growth period in seven years, according to new numbers from research firm Gartner.

Worldwide, the computer market bounced back in a big way at the end of 2009, Gartner says, largely on the back of low-cost netbooks and consumer laptops, which were heavily-discounted for the holidays.

“These preliminary results indicate the recovery of the PC market on a global level,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner in a statement.

Worldwide computer shipments grew 22.1%  in Q4 (numbering 90 million units).

Hewlett-Packard displaced Dell as the biggest PC maker in the U.S., and Acer established itself as the low-price leader.

In the U.S., Apple saw gains of 23.2% compared to Q4 2008 (which was dismal). However, competitors like Toshiba led the PC pack with 70.7% growth, trailed by Acer (48.4%) and HP (45.9%). Dell lagged with only 5.5% growth, largely because it didn’t discount for the holidays. “Dell was not as aggressive on pricing as its competitors in order to protect profits,” Gartner said.

Growth was driven by the consumer market — not the business market — and the Windows 7 was did not create additional PC demand, although Gartner said “the launch was a good market tool during holiday sales.”

“It was the strongest quarter over quarter growth rate the worldwide PC market has experienced in the last seven years,” Gartner said in a statement.

Full release after the jump.

Magic Mouse users over at the Apple.com Discussion Board have been complaining that their multitouch mice require almost weekly battery swaps for a couple of months now. Apple has yet to officially acknowledge the problem, but an experiment by Softpedia confirms the issue.

The good news? It’s not really the Magic Mouse: it’s an issue with the Magic Mouse’s power management software. The bad news: that doesn’t really change anything until Apple issues a fix.

The experiment was simple: Softpedia plugged a fresh set of batteries into their Magic Mouse then let the batteries drain until the Magic Mouse software reports the batteries are dead. Softpedia then took these “dead” batteries and plugged them into an old Mighty Mouse. Voila! According to the Mighty Mouse software, the batteries still had as much as 40% charge remaining.

That’s a pretty astonishing bug. According to Softpedia, even a 50% charge isn’t sufficient to power a Magic Mouse in some cases. If Softpedia’s experiment is true, Apple needs to fix this bug, pronto.

Now, I’ve long since sworn off trusting Apple to sell me a mouse, so I can’t confirm this: that leaves it up to you. Anyone willing to give Softpedia’s experiment a shot and let me know how it goes for them in the comments?

When Shawn Ahmed travels to places such as Bangladesh to fight poverty he counts on iPhones and Macs to help him do battle.

Ahmed is the founder of a one-man global relief effort he calls the Uncultured Project and is using technology and social media in inventive ways to engage people across the globe in their common humanity.

In partnership with the Save the Children Foundation and USAID, Ahmed went last summer to a cyclone devastated village in Galachipa, Bangladesh to distribute non-food relief items to victims of the disaster. He provided individual donors to Uncultured Project real-time receipts for their generosity using his iPhone and TwitPic.

As seen in the clip above, Ahmed used his iPhone to show villagers in another Bangladeshi community videos made by the people in the west who helped bring safe, clean drinking water to their lives. “This is not a charity,” Ahmed said, “it’s an experiment in community.”

The 28 year-old native of Toronto, Canada quit his scholarship graduate studies at Notre Dame University after being inspired by Dr. Jeffery Sachs (author of The End of Poverty) to try and make the world a better place — one meaningful difference at a time.

“I’ve also been using the iPhone to report real-time in the field,” Ahmed said in an email. He makes extensive use of Twitter and YouTube to break down the distance between his supporters and the communities they support. Connecting to them with his iPhone, Ahmed said, “I hold votes on how I should help people in Bangladesh. Voting has led [to] school supply distributions to orphans and much more. And, of course, all my videos are edited on a MacBook.”

The Uncultured Project’s YouTube channel just went over 10,000 subscribers and Ahmed is hopeful for the prospects of his unpaid, unemployed, uncultured journey to help the poorest of the poor: “It’s about inspiring others to believe that we can be the generation that ends extreme poverty.”

Computing legend and former Apple Fellow Alan Kay has kindly written a detailed note explaining a comment he made at CES, facetiously reported here. Looking for a newsy nugget from Kay’s complex talk, I was trying to make a joke about something profound being revealed at the CES gadget orgy. (“We all thought it was pretty funny too,” said Kay in a separate email).

Kay’s note explains a comment he made about the logical expression NOT BOTH underlying all human thinking.

“What I said was that all human symbol/logical REPRESENTATION systems and all computers past present and future can be made from NOT BOTH,” Kay says.

Kay’s full, fascinating email after the jump.

As equally tenuous a confirmation of last week’s Wall Street Journal report that the Apple Tablet’s enclosure would be made of a very Mac-conventional material indeed, this Reuters report, which says that the Apple Tablet will be a brushed aluminum unibody affair, and ship in Q2 of 2010.

I don’t even know where to begin on this one. Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple hardware SVP who oversaw the creation of the iMac and generations worth of iPods (and, it goes without saying, dozens of early prototypes of the iPhone, given that he left Apple only a year before its release), claimed during an interview at CES that he has “never even used an iPhone.”

Now, whether or not this was a true statement (interviewer Kara Swisher didn’t believe him, and I’m mostly in her camp), it’s certainly not a terribly smart one. If he’s telling the truth, it means he’s never used the top-selling phone in the U.S. market, a device that has turned the global mobile market on its head and dramatically threatened traditional powers like Motorola and Nokia and, well, Palm. It’s kind of hard to beat what you’ve never tried.

If Rubinstein is lying, it’s almost worse, a passive-aggressive attempt at point-scoring that belies a grudge with his former employer that could get in the way of beating them. All in all, it’s just one of those moments that really makes you appreciate how effortlessly Steve Jobs belittles competitor products — he can actually make you believe he would never use anything but Apple because they’re that much better. When Rubinstein tries to be as dismissive in the other direction, he just sounds bitter.

Once the most bitter opponents of Cupertino’s allegedly wasteful and polluting ways, environmental advocacy group Greenpeace has awarded Cupertino a four-star rating in their latest environmental survey.

Still, it doesn’t seem like Apple has done all that much to earn the applause. In fact, Apple only gained 0.2 points from its previous 4.9 environmental rating. That said, most of the other companies surveyed by Greenpeace, including Samsung, Sharp and Sony, fell in their rankings this month, automatically elevating Apple to the number five spot.

Greenpeace isn’t entirely happy with Apple: though they applaud Cupertino for eliminating hazardous substances in their product line while other companies make empty promises, they feel that Apple’s re-designed environmental section of their website is actually less informative than it used to be.

Still, it’s nice to see one of Apple’s most vocal and implacable critics recognize the great work Apple has done over the last couple of years in making their products as environmentally friendly as possible.

LAS VEGAS — Peter Sisson is the CEO of Toktumi, a San Francisco company with a cool app that adds a second phone number to your iPhone. He kinda looks like Roger Sterling, the silver-haired, hard-drinking, hard smoking character from Mad Men.

Except Peter isn’t smoking, and he isn’t drinking. But he’s certainly got the same moxie. Sisson borrowed someone’s badge to gain entrance to an exclusive, invite-only CES event so that he could pitch a new version of his iPhone app to some of the hundreds of press in attendance. I’m glad he did, because it’s a doozie.

UPDATE: My apologies, this story is incorrect. I followed up with Buffalo Technologies, who now say Apple had only an advisory role in the inclusion of Firewire. The decision was not an Apple mandate, and not all portable drives sold in the Apple Store have Firewire as well as USB, as readers have noted. In an email, Buffalo’s Brian Verenkoff says:

“Apple never insisted we do anything, nor can they force any company to do something they don’t want to. Obviously given the nature of this product, we designed it for the iPod/iPhone user base and did have ongoing dialog with Apple to make sure we developed a product that was compatible with their store and their customers. At the end of the day, every decision was made by Buffalo as to the product features.”

LAS VEGAS – Here’s something I bet you didn’t know. Every portable hard drive sold in Apple’s retail stores must include a Firewire port.

I found this out while getting a demo of Buffalo Technology’s Dualie, a combination iPhone/iPod dock and 500-Gbyte dockable hard drive.

Here’s a good idea for virally marketing apps that Apple should think about — wirelessly beaming apps to other iPhones like the Zune’s music sharing feature.

Microsoft’s Zune is mostly a me-too product, but it’s one great feature is being able to lend music to friends Zune-to-Zune via Wi-Fi. Shared tracks can be played three times, after which they must be purchased from the Zune marketplace. It’s a great idea but tragically underused because there are so few Zunes out there.