Excitement over the iPad’s introduction continues to accelerate production of new App Store entries more than six weeks after Apple unveiled its tablet device. Indeed, the number of new iPhone OS apps produced rose 185 percent since the iPad became public January 27.
“Over six weeks since Apple announced the iPad, Flurry continues to measure a significant increase in iPhone OS new application starts within the system,” Flurry Analytics’ Peter Farago writes. The company said a large number of the new applications are “custom version of existing applications tailored for the iPad.”
While most Apple watchers have been concentrating on the iPad, something unexpected happened: sales of Macs and iPods rose higher than financial experts expected. The new retail numbers makes one analyst believe Wall Street is in for a surprise for the March quarter.
According to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster’s interpretation of retail sales figures supplied by research firm NPD, Mac sales are up 39 percent compared to the same period a year ago, far above the prevailing Wall Street expectations of a 22 percent nosedive. Likewise, iPod sales, according to the NPD data, increased by 7 percent through February, up from a 17 percent drop financial experts were expecting.
As a result, Munster believes Apple will sell 2.8 million to 2.9 million Macs for the second quarter, a tad higher than Wall Street’s expected 2.7 million second quarter results. The analyst also foresees 9 to 10 million iPods sold during the period, up from the Street’s prediction of 9 million.
The rosy picture comes with some provisos, though. First, it should have been easy for Apple to beat expectations, given 2009 got off to such a sluggish start. Another point that Munster makes is that while unit sales are up, the average selling price is lower. The average price of a Mac is down 10 percent compared to the 7 percent Munster had expected. Although the analyst had expected the average selling price of iPods to be higher, the actual ASP inched up just 3 percent, compared to the 15 percent the analyst had expected.
On Windows, when you’ve finished using a particular piece of software, you close it with the X symbol in the top right corner of the application window.
Many switchers assume that the window close control in the top left of an OS X application window does the same job: but that’s not quite true.
About a hundred years ago, while I was still a Windows user and thought that a Mac was what you covered in a cheese and slurped down for lunch, I whiled away way too much time playing a DOS-based artillery duel game called Scorched Earth. Dot Matrix Interactive Designs have created their own version in the extremely polished, multiplayer KIL.A.TON — and it’s even more of a blast to play.
You’re all going crazy with your iPad ordering. Meanwhile, over on Vimeo, BrewBeau has some craziness of his own going on.
BrewBeau writes: “I’m a recent PC convert who waited patiently while Apple worked out the kinks with their latest iMac release of the 27″ Intel powered 2.8GHz quad core i7 iMac. It’s a thing of beauty and I wanted to relay my experience of getting my new machine.”
In the Hackintosh community, the MSI Wind is somewhat legendary for being the first netbook out there that could essentially run OS X out of the box, with all features working and no hardware hacking required.
Now it looks like the venerable Wind has another Apple bragging point: with its keyboard ripped out and its display replaced with a touchscreen and reversed, the MSI Wind U100 makes a good poor man’s substitute for the iPad.
Sure, it doesn’t use the iPhone OS — it’s running Snow Leopard 10.6.2 — and it’s got some rough edges (it can only be turned on and off by wiggling a little paperclip in a hole), but if you were hoping that Steve Jobs was going to announce a MacTablet on January 27th instead of a big iPhone, this might be just the project to devote your weekend to.
Although most famously known for his system-crushing, next-gen 3D engines, id software’s John Carmack has been a passionate enthusiast of iPhone app development. He’s personally cited the platform as a return to the older school of game design, where a single enthusiast can turn out a great game in a matter of a couple months, and id software’s (excellent) iPhone ports of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were basically pet projects of Carmack himself.
No surprise, then, that Carmack is interested in the iPad. Speaking to Kotaku, Carmack said: “”Apple doesn’t give us anything ahead of time either, so haven’t put hands on it ourselves, but we certainly are expecting to try to have our Rage title for the iPhone, iPad, whatever, working across there.”
Rage is id’s upcoming post-apocalyptic, Mad Max inspired FPS and racing game, the first title to be released running id’s bleeding edge id Tech 5 engine. I’m not buying that the iPad has the oomph to run Rage at all: rather, I imagine that he is talking about bringing a spin-off title to the iPhone and iPad, similarly to the way Doom Resurrection brought Doom 3 to the App Store.
Either way, it’s exciting news, and Carmack remains as mouthbreathingly charming as an uber-dork as he could possibly be: the id software founder says that, given his druthers, he wants to budget a couple of months into every year where he can just disappear into his programming lair and code iPhone games.
When the iPad was first announced, Apple promised that the process for signing up for 3G service would eschew the iPhone’s Mephistophelean contract with AT&T. Instead, it would be simple, allowing end users to sign up and cancel their 3G service on a month-by-month basis.
If these screenshots of the iPad’s Settings panel are anything to go by, Apple’s been just as good as their word here. It’s hard to imagine, in fact, how signing up for 3G could be any simpler: you don’t even have to deal with AT&T.
Apparently, all you do to sign up for 3G is open up the iPad’s settings, plunk in your credit card information and then specify your order size: 250MB of data per month for only $14.99, all-you-can-gobble for $29.99. Simple! And if you sign up for the 250MB plan, you’ll get three alerts — 20 percent, 10 percent and empty — to let you know when you’re running low on data and affording you the option to top up with some more.
This is about as painless as it gets. I just hope international telecoms follow AT&T’s lead here and keep it simple, stupid. There’s just no room in my budget for yet another two-year data contract at this point.
We close out another week we three hardware deals. First up is a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with a 22-inch screen and lots of extra goodies from ExperCom, including 8GB of RAM and three years of AppleCare – all for $1,399. Next up is a deal on a MacBook powered by a Core 2 Duo 2.26GHz processor, along with 4GB of RAM and a 640GB hard drive. Lastly, we have an iPod Classic with 120GB of storage for $189 from the Apple Store.
Along the way, we check out more deals on an Airport Extreme router, the latest batch of App Store Freebies and other items aimed at Apple fans. As always, details on our featured items, as well as many other products, are available on the CoM “Daily Deals” page coming up right after the jump.
