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More to Mac sales than a halo

It's very easy to take a look at Apple's stellar fourth quarter and conclude that the long-awaited iPod "halo effect" is in full swing and move onto something more pressing, like handicapping the World Series.

For years as the iPod took over the digital music player market, we all wondered whether it was a one-hit wonder, whether Apple could translate that success into increased Mac market share. Millions of people who might not have used an Apple product since they spent the third grade playing Oregon Trail on an Apple II were re-introduced to Apple through … Read more

Does new iPhone ad pass the sniff test?

Life is good at Apple these days. Around 1.39 million iPhones sold. Soaring earnings. A new OS on the way. The Mac is gaining ground on the rest of the PC industry. The company can do no wrong. But that hasn't stopped a handful of critics from getting upset over one of the new iPhone ads currently running on a TV screen near you.

The ad in question is "Delay," which depicts an alleged airline pilot, Bryce, talking about how he used his iPhone's weather.com app to help avoid a major delay. The ads have gotten some of the folks over at FlyerTalk's forums pretty riled up.

Marathon Man, a poster from Massachusetts, started it all off by saying: "So I just saw for the first time this Apple iPhone commercial where a pilot (or some crew member that could be one) is standing there telling us that his iPhone was able to… Read more

iPod growth slowing...unless you count the iPhone

Apple's earnings report today was stellar for the company and its shareholders--the 67% increase in profits over the year-ago quarter was particularly noteworthy. But I noticed that iPod sales came in short of some financial analysts' expectations. Looking back at recent Apple earnings calls on iLounge, I noticed that this was the case in Q2 and Q3 as well. (Apple's fiscal year begins Oct. 1, so this was Q4.)

More generally, iPod unit sales aren't growing as quickly as they used to. Here's year-to-year iPod unit growth for the last five quarters, again reported by iLounge: … Read more

Apple earnings soar, 1.4 million iPhones sold to date

UPDATED 3:42 p.m.--Added a few more details, numbers, and statements from Apple executives from the conference call.

Apple reported another stellar quarter Monday, exceeding estimates in just about every facet of its business.

For the company's fourth fiscal quarter, which ended September 29, the company reported revenue of $6.22 billion and profit of $904 million, or $1.01 in earnings per share. Wall Street analysts had expected Apple to report revenue of $6.1 billion and earnings per share of 86 cents, according to estimates compiled by Thomson Financial.

Apple has now sold 1.39 … Read more

Mac OS X 10.5 gets geotagging support

There were a lot of one-liners to sift through in Apple's feature list for the Leopard, the Mac OS X 10.5 update due Friday, so I thought it worthwhile to call out the geotagging support.

The Preview software, which lets users get details on files they're browsing, "pinpoints the location where you took the photo on a world map," according to Apple's Leopard feature list. "From there you can even open the GPS location in Google Maps."

I gather from the adverb "even" that I should read this news with … Read more

With TakeTV and Fanfare, SanDisk aims to bridge gap between PC video and TV

It was first shown at January's Consumer Electronics Show--and then leaked on Buy.com just days ago--but the Sansa TakeTV is now official. It's not the first device designed to put PC-based digital videos on the TV, but what sets SanDisk's TakeTV apart is its simplicity: just drag and drop videos to the flash drive from your PC, and then plug it into the included video dock to watch them on your TV. The straightforward operation is a notable counterpoint to most other PC-to-TV digital video alternatives, which involve either cumbersome direct hook-ups (video and audio runs … Read more

Make your plans for the Vintage Computer Festival 10.0

I've been to a lot of computer conferences over the last 30 years-- my first was the mainframe-oriented National Computer Conference in 1979, and I've probably been to 250 more since then-- but one of my favorites is also the smallest: the Vintage Computer Festival, hosted by Sellam Ismail.

Over the years at these conferences (a collection of my badges as of 1998 or so is shown here), and in my own life, I've seen and used an awful lot of computer hardware.

I'm surprised that some kinds of systems that were very popular in the … Read more

Marble of doom tracks computer hang time

The Marble of Doom is a cute site created by some folks who clearly have a good sense of humor about waiting for their computer to finish processing. It's Mac-centric, and aimed to track all the time you've lost due to the Mac's version of the hourglass, also known as the "marble of doom" and "spinning beach ball of death." Whenever this happens, you just have to sit there and wait it out, leading to a somewhat inevitable destruction of any productivity.

The site tracks this time, and sorts it out by the … Read more