The next program in the iLife ’11 suite that Apple will be talking about today is iMovie ’11.
What’s new? According to Steve, iMovie ’11 has all new audio editing for mere mortals who don’t want to invest in Final Cut Pro, as well as one step effects, a people finder, news and sports themes and the ability to create movie trailers.
Steve Jobs has just taken things back from Tim Cook, and now he’s announcing the first new product of the Back to Mac event. As predicted, it’s iLife ’11.
“I’d like to talk about iLife. It’s widely regarded as the best suite of digital lifestyle apps in the world. You can’t do this on any other computer. We improve it every year or two, coming out with new version.”
First up, he details the changes to iPhoto, which is gaining vastly expanded fullscreen support, as well as gobs of Facebook enhancements, easier emailing functionality and some new slideshows. There’s more though… and it only gets more impressive as the presentation goes on.
As is his wont, and despite his appearance at an earnings call earlier this week, Apple is starting off the Back to Mac event with some earnings, this time putting the Mac business in context.
Last year, the Mac side of Apple’s empire account for $22 billion, or 33% of their revenue. So Mac is still big business for Apple, despite iOS’ huge success.
“To put this in some context, the mac company, if it were standalone… and we have no plans to do that… would be #110 on the Fortune 500.”
Apple is making three times what they did on OS X five years ago. They have 50 million users world wide. One in five PCs sold at retail is over 20%, and last quarter, the Mac grew two and a half fold.
That’s a lot of Macs sold. OS X might be second tier to iOS right now, but it’s still huge business.
With his usual fanfare, Steve Jobs has just strutted onto the stage at Apple’s own Cupertino headquarters for today’s Back to the Mac event.
Steve’s looking confident, and he has every reason to be with $50 billion in the bank. The big question is, what will Apple be announcing today to add to the corporate coffers? iLife ’11 and OS X 10.7 are definites, as is a new MacBook Air… but could we also see a Verizon iPhone, refreshed MacBooks and maybe the slam dunk of a totally new product that Apple has somehow managed to keep completely secret by the end of the next hour and a half?
Place your bets in the comments, but best do it quick: Steve’s about to open his mouth, and that’s when the bets begin to close, one by one.
[image via Engadget]
We’ve seen it in PC versus Mac sales, now a new report claims businesses are opting to buy more Macs than PCs. A quarter of all computers added in the enterprise in 2011 will be Macs, according to the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. Additionally, by next year, 70 percent of businesses will have Macs at the workplace.
“Much of the growth in Macs will happen in organizations that already have Macs installed,” the organization announced in a report. IT managers point to Macs being less expensive to manage, easier to configure and requiring less training and troubleshooting than Windows-based systems.
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There’s plenty of Twitter clients on the App Store, from Twitter’s official software to power apps like TweetDeck, but watch this peaceful and somnolent video for the somewhat regrettably named Super Twario and you’ll have discovered one of the most pleasant Twitter clients around.
iBooks is plenty impressive, but despite Apple’s own leap into the realm of e-books, Amazon is going strong with the Kindle platform. They’ve managed to price the Kindle affordably enough at this point that few who only want an e-reader are likely to spend another few hundred on an iPad, and they’ve successfully managed to leverage their real strength against iBooks time and time again: if you buy a book through Amazon, you will not only be able to read it on every gadget out there, whether you have a Kindle, an Android smartphone, or a Mac… but thanks to their Whispersync technology, you’ll even be able to keep your bookmarks and annotations synced across every platform forever.
It’s nice to see Amazon fighting so ably against the competition of iBooks to their empire, and even nicer to see a new update to their Kindle for Mac software come down the pipeline which adds improved Whispersync functionality, which will allow you to keep your notes and highlighted passages synced across all your devices. There’s also a refreshed interface which looks much more Mac-like than previously.
If you buy Kindle over iBooks — and there’s absolutely no shame in that — go grab the latest update now.
The conventional hard disk drive may be going the way of the floppy disk, a retirement accelerated by Apple’s increasing use of flash memory in such popular devices as the iPad. Hard drive maker Western Digital could see shipments for netbooks and inexpensive laptops fall by 10 to 20 percent, the company CEO told reporters Tuesday.
CEO John Coyne told analysts investors should take a longer view about his industry in words meant to reassure a nervous Wall Street. “What I would say to investors is to look at the long-term demand for storage, the fact is the most appropriate solution for mass volume storage is hard drives and to look at the long-term progress the industry has made over the last 10 years,” he said in a call.
Obihai Technology, a tiny Cupertino start-up, this month brought to market its first product, the OBi110 — an unassuming $70 box with blinky lights that may well prove to be the most disruptive telephony device to come along in a decade.
The OBi110 is the physical hub in a multi-layered communications model the company believes can revolutionize the way consumers use their mobile, Internet and fixed-line telephony services, bringing emerging social networking behaviors together with maturing Voice over IP (VoIP) technology to create total communication freedom at the personal level.
With web and mobile-based software products, including an iPhone app presently in Beta testing, Obihai is poised to show the millions of consumers who’ve bought magicJacks and all 237 of them who’ve bought an Ooma just how IP telephony can be done.
Next time you go to the hospital, your doctor might whip out an iPad to show you X-rays, check drug interactions or review your medical history.
These are just some of the uses doctors are finding for Apple’s handy tablet computer in the Chicago area where three local hospitals are iPad early adopters.
At MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island, the device “went through here like wildfire,” once doctors realized they could use the device to quickly access hospital records said Dr. Richard Watson, who works in the ER room. “At least half of our staff here in the emergency room has their own iPad and carries it and uses it.”