Apple

If there was any doubt about the popularity of Apple's iPhone, a quick look at the latest market share figures from research firm Gartner should put them to rest.

Released on Wednesday, the newest data from Gartner shows that Apple's share of worldwide smartphone sales grew from 5.3 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to 10.8 percent in the first quarter of 2009. In terms of unit sales, Apple jumped from 1.7 million in the first quarter of 2008 to 3.9 million during the same period in 2009.

While the quarter's iPhone adoption metrics may be impressive, Apple wasn't the only smartphone maker with big gains. Research In Motion saw its BlackBerry market share rise from 13.3 percent in first quarter of 2008 to 19.9 percent in 2009. The company's unit sales grew from 4.3 million to 7.2 million over the same period.

Nokia saw its market share drop almost 4 percent, from 45.1 percent in first quarter of 2008 to 41.2 percent in 2009. Despite the decline, Nokia remains the world's No. 1 smartphone maker, followed by Research In Motion and Apple.

Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza said growth in the smartphone category was driven by touch-screen products such as the iPhone and BlackBerry Storm, and credited "tighter integration with applications and services around music, mobile e-mail, and Internet browsing," as key factors to growth.

Although traditional mobile-phone sales still dominate the market, a clear shift is under way. Mobile-phone sales for the first quarter of 2009 totaled 269.1 million, a drop of 9.4 percent over the same period last year.

Smartphone sales for the first quarter of 2009 were 36.4 million, representing a 12.7 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008.

China Mobile's plans to open its own mobile app store probably have doomed any chance of Apple's iPhone getting onto that network.

(Credit: CNET)

China Mobile is staking out its own ground in the mobile-application marketplace.

According to IDG News Service, the world's largest wireless carrier plans to introduce its own mobile-application store later this year, calling it "Mobile Market." The report says the store will be open to both independent developers and companies, though it's not clear what operating system or platform technologies will be used by the phones running on China Mobile's network when the store is ready to go.

China Mobile's plans for Mobile Market illustrate the difficulties that it and Apple faced in trying to reach an agreement to sell the iPhone through China Mobile. The two companies have flirted for quite some time, but Apple's insistence on being the sole gatekeeper and distributor for iPhone applications would have been at odds with China Mobile's desire to offer its own service, which is why Apple is believed to be negotiating with China Unicom instead.

Apple's approach is rare in the nascent mobile-application world: many other makers of mobile operating systems are trying to find a way to let carriers such as China Mobile in on the action while maintaining their own central roles. With about 415 million subscribers, China Mobile's customers will be an attractive target for handset companies and software developers.

Apple gave up a sliver of Internet market share last month, according to preliminary figures released Sunday by Web metrics company Net Applications.

February figures from Net Applications on operating system share amid Internet use.

(Credit: Net Applications)

The Mac OS had been hovering around the 10 percent mark among operating systems accessing the Web. But in its Operating System Market Share report for February, Net Applications showed the Mac OS at 9.71 percent, down from 9.93 percent in January. Meanwhile, Microsoft Windows' Internet share increased to 89.37 percent from 88.26 percent in January.

February figures from Net Applications on Windows 7 beta usage.

(Credit: Net Applications)

In a separate report, Net Applications reported spikes in usage share of Windows 7--the follow-on to Windows Vista potentially due out later this year--after Microsoft released the public beta of the operating system in January. In the report, Net Applications attributed these spikes to weekend users:

Similar to Windows Vista, Windows 7 usage share is showing a pattern of being much higher on weekends than on weekdays. In contrast, Windows XP has an inverse trendline. XP's share is higher on weekdays due to Microsoft's relatively high business vs. residential share of Windows XP.

This is an indication of strong interest in Windows 7, since it does not come pre-installed on a computer like Vista. Beta users are taking the time and effort to install it on their home computers, since corporations generally prohibit beta operating systems to be used in production environments.

February figures from Net Applications on mobile browsing market share.

(Credit: Net Applications)

In the mobile browsing arena, Net Applications reported that it had taken its first detailed look at market share and pronounced Apple's iPhone as having a "commanding lead" with 66.61 percent of the market. But, Net Applications noted, "Android and BlackBerry are rapidly gaining market share. This does not mean that iPhone web browsing is shrinking, because the overall market is growing rapidly."

Upstart Android, which Google released in October, came in fourth with 6.15 percent, following No. 2 Java ME's 9.06 percent and No. 3 Windows Mobile's 6.91 percent.

The Android Market now offers the $200 'I Am Richer' application.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

An application that did nothing beyond showing a person was willing to spend gobs of money for it didn't last long on Apple's App Store, but now we'll begin to see if Google lives up to its more laissez-faire approach to its rival Android Market.

Apple banned Armin Heinrich's "I Am Rich", which cost $1,000 and only showed a red ruby, from its App Store last August. Now the conceptually similar "I Am Richer" has arrived on the Android Market from Mike DG.

Perhaps owners of T-Mobile's G1 phone are more cost-conscious, or the recession has hurt the market for inane software, or Android programmers are willing to offer greater value, though, because the new application offers basically the same feature set for only $200, a fifth the price of the app Apple banned.

"Prove your wealth to others by running this app and showing them the mesmerizing glowing crystal," the software's description says.

Google has some rules for Android Market--no malware is allowed, for example--but generally has a much more liberal attitude than Apple. While each application on the App Store requires Apple's approval, Google plans to let the world at large sort out Android applications through the mechanisms such as the rating system. Good applications will eventually sift their way to the top of the heap the way good YouTube videos do, Google argues.

Update 7:06 p.m. PST: The $200 price is as much as Google permits organizations to charge, the company said. And yes, Google appears perfectly happy to let people buy the application:

"We check applications for compliance with the Market Content Policies and Terms of Service (in order to remove malware, porn, spam, or profanity)," the company said in a statement.

(Via IDG News)

The iPhone has risen to prominence on Flickr, rivaling most SLRs in popularity. These statistics from Yahoo cover the last 12 months.

(Credit: Yahoo)

The iPhone is the mobile device of choice these days for doing most things that need a network. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the phone has carved out a prominent place on Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr.

The Flickr Camera Finder, Yahoo's statistical counter of camera use among its members, shows that since the arrival of the iPhone 3G model earlier this year, the phone has vaulted not only over all other camera phones, trouncing the Nokia N95 in second place, but also almost all ordinary cameras.

That's a notable accomplishment. I've been watching the Flickr Camera Finder for two years, and that's the first time I recall a camera phone placing so highly. The top ranks have been dominated by SLRs, the camera of choice for many of Flickr's heaviest users.

With the debut of the 3G model, Apple's iPhone surged to a commanding lead among camera phones used at Flickr. These statistics from Yahoo cover the last 12 months.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Right now the iPhone is in a virtual tie with Canon's Rebel XT and Nikon's D80, two SLRs whose popularity is waning with the arrival of newer models from the dominant makers of such cameras. Only Canon's newer Rebel XTi outranks the iPhone.

Though the trajectory is clear, there are caveats. First, Flickr measures popularity on the basis of the number of users who've uploaded a photo on a given day. In other words, the camera used by a person who uploads one photo a day will fare better than one who uploads 100 pictures one day a month. Second, many camera phones don't identify themselves to Flickr, so their use isn't logged. Last, these statistics fluctuate daily, and who knows what kind of anomalous behavior is going on during the holidays.

The total number of photos uploaded from the Rebel XTi is about 51 million, compared with 5.8 million for the iPhone. However, there are nearly 3,000 people uploading daily from their iPhone compared with about 6,500 for the XTi.

My guess is the iPhone's better-than-average network abilities are responsible for the prominence. For the same reason, iPhone users also use Google Maps and other online services more than most mobile device users. The BlackBerry is good at e-mail, but the Internet has other attractions.

What's more interesting is extrapolating from the trend. Certainly the iPhone's image quality doesn't hold a candle to even old point-and-shoots, much less new SLRs, but the phone taps straight into the social features of Flickr--the ability to photographically share with friends and family what's going on in your life, for example. There are innumerable expert photographers at Flickr, but it looks like the yet larger herd of ordinary snapshooters are going to leave them in the dust once liberated with the ability to post pictures at will.

I sent my iPhone photos to Flickr using the site's upload-by-e-mail service (see Yahoo's instructions), but there are several iPhone applications that will do it for you if you prefer. Apple's photo e-mailing software scales photos to 640x480, but I don't mind, given feeble image quality and the unlikelihood that these shots will ever make their way beyond a computer screen.

Steve Jobs' annual keynotes at Macworld have come to an end.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News)

With its decision to end its relationship with the Macworld Expo, Apple is cutting one of its last ties to an era in which it wasn't a technology powerhouse.

The shocking news that January's Macworld would be the last with Apple's participation--and that CEO Steve Jobs will not appear--reveals an Apple that has decided it no longer needs to make an appearance at the event that has come to define the company in recent years. In doing so, it's also preparing for a future when its iconic founder no longer dominates the stage the way he currently does while confirming a shift in its strategic thinking when it comes to reaching customers.

Apple relies on two types of marketing: one, the slick commercials with the cool music that showcase what its products can do, such as the Mac versus PC ads and the famous silhouetted dancing iPod listeners. The second method is the Stevenote: Jobs is a master at the art of presenting new products and rolling out strategies to both the public (Macworld) and the press (WWDC, iPod events).

Macworld was Apple's signature Stevenote, drawing rabid coverage from the tech press and a mention on almost every nightly news show in America the night following one of Jobs' presentations. The various other Apple-produced events during the year, such as the June Worldwide Developers Conference or September iPod event, haven't always generated as much buzz as Macworld, where Apple has trained the media and its customers to await the company's Next Big Thing. That fever pitch reached a peak in January 2007, when Apple confirmed the long-standing rumors that it would enter the mobile phone market with the iPhone.

But industry events like Macworld Expo have been losing their luster inside Apple for some time. This is not a company that spends much time hanging out with its peers in the personal computing and mobile phone industries; Apple is often conspicuously absent at the types of panel discussions and press events that draw other companies on a regular basis.

And quite simply, the nature of technology marketing has changed a great deal as tech has evolved from something reserved for professionals to something that almost everyone uses on a day to day basis.

Apple's newest legion of fans--teenagers and young professionals--are not going to wander around San Francisco's Moscone Center in January soaking up the scene when they can simply wait for the products to appear online or at the nearest Apple Store, or follow the coverage on their favorite blog.

Without Macworld, Apple will need to host more events such as the iPhone SDK event in February to get its message out.

(Credit: Corrine Schulze/CNET)

Those customers can be reached through a combination of relentless television and Internet advertising and word-of-mouth campaigns, which Apple doesn't even have to engineer itself thanks to the legions of Mac bloggers and news coverage. But the company can't simply hunker down in Cupertino behind its advertising agencies and friends in the media; there's no substitute in business for the human touch, and Apple will need to make semi-regular public appearances to keep its machine humming.

So what if Apple could produce its own show, something akin to Oracle's gigantic OracleWorld lovefest in San Francisco every autumn? It could still draw the usual Mac faithful that showed up at Macworld every year and tailor much of the experience to the new generation of Apple customers.

Or it could hold a number of smaller events at its flagship retail stores in New York and San Francisco, drawing the same amount of coverage and fans while maintaining tight control of its message.

And that has always been one of Apple's top priorities. The company's tight fist on the outbound flow of information from Apple means that events like Macworld take on the utmost importance; Jobs' keynote is an hour and a half when this industry comes to a complete halt, as hundreds of thousands of people hit refresh on their live blog of choice to find out if the rampant rumor and speculation has come true.

To keep its position as one of the tech industry's most buzz-generating machines, Apple will need to find something to duplicate that experience without attending Macworld. And that of course brings up the elephant that has been in Apple's room all year long: the future of Jobs' association with Apple.

Apple declined to comment specifically on Jobs' health Tuesday, but the company has had to fight off rumors of a recurrence of his cancer ever since June, when he appeared to have lost a lot of weight. The move to have Phil Schiller keynote Macworld doesn't necessarily give any credence to those rumors--although watch the stock market run wild with them tomorrow--but no matter how you slice it, Apple the corporation is going to outlive Jobs the CEO.

The end of Apple's association with Macworld gives the company a chance to introduce new faces and new methods of putting together its most important marketing presentations of the year. Apple has been making room for executives other than Jobs for years on the keynote stage, but the most important topics were always reserved for Jobs alone.

And Macworld was always going to be associated with Jobs' legendary performances; very few current Apple executives could have hoped to duplicate that exact role. But if Apple takes this opportunity to develop its own event, with a broader roster of Apple executives and employees taking the stage to discuss the company's growing line of businesses, it would reduce the reliance on Jobs' appearance to set the tone for the company. That way when it does come time for Jobs to relinquish control of the company, Apple will have set a precedent for someone other than Jobs to deliver the big news at the event.

Apple is developing its own gravitational pull at this point in its history. The company has never been more influential or rich, and it is using that power and money to set its own agenda for the next decade.

It may seem obvious to say this, but Apple's performance in the future will mostly rely on the quality of its products rather than its marketing vehicle of choice. Still, don't discount the role that Apple's singular ability to whip the digerati into a frenzy has played in the company's fortunes over the last five years.

That has to continue in some fashion for Apple to remain a tech powerhouse.

In New York, some Apple fans were miffed that the first people waiting in line for the iPhone 3G were activists hoping to stir up publicity for a cause. But don't you think they would've been even more ticked off if those first spots in the line were taken up by paid actors?

That's what's happened in Poland, where mobile phone operator Orange has admitted to Reuters that nearly two dozen stores in the country were manned with a line of actors in anticipation of Friday's iPhone launch.

"We have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone," the company told Reuters. The company has not said how many people were hired, how long they had to wait, or how they would be compensated.

But I certainly hope they got to keep the iPhones for free.

The whole thing is not really that far-fetched an idea. When lines started forming outside Apple Stores in New York long before the launch of the iPhone 3G, rumors circulated that it was actually a prank on behalf of culture jammers Improv Everywhere. It seemed more than plausible. Turns out the lines were real, due to rationing of the first-generation iPhones in anticipation of the still-unannounced 3G.

Regardless, it could be funny to see how an out-of-work comedian reacts to an overlong in-store activation process.

When you're the world's largest chipmaker, it's hard to turn on a dime. It can be even harder to admit when you've overreached.

A shift has taken place at Intel over the last year or so. Once known for dictating the direction of the PC market, Intel is increasingly letting its customers carve their own path. With that subtle yet important change, the PC industry is moving past its Model T era and entering a new world of style and design, where a simple black or gray box won't do.

The most recent and telling example of this shift is the special version of the Core 2 Duo that Intel built at the request of Apple, one of its smallest yet most influential customers. Intel accelerated the development of a much smaller chip packaging technology and lowered the chip's power consumption, just so Apple could build the MacBook Air.

Intel has done exclusive chips for special customers in the past, but since Sean Maloney took the helm of Intel's sales and marketing in 2006, the chipmaker is much more willing to find a way to meet the needs and ideas of its PC customers--and to recognize that father doesn't always know best.

These days, Intel is cleverly taking a page from Advanced Micro Devices, the smaller chipmaker that has managed to work the phrase "customer-centric" into just about every press release and public appearance since 2003.

Intel salespeople are now encouraged to spend more time out of the office, talking to PC customers and designers and taking their ideas and concerns back to the mothership. Those customers have rapidly matured; instead of one basic desktop and laptop design for all, they are starting to realize that different people want different things.

They are customizing products for various segments and even different geographies, and introducing new designs like Gateway's all-in-one or Apple's MacBook Air. That reality makes it harder to dictate a top-down vision for the PC market, since there are now so many different types of customer needs to try to satisfy.

Intel's product-planning priorities have changed as a result. The Nehalem generation of processors, due in the second half of this year, will be one of Intel's most complicated launches ever because of the huge variety among different chips.

Some will have integrated memory controllers. Some will have point-to-point interconnects. You'll see dual-core, quad-core, and perhaps more in the server market. Some will be hot-and-heavy powerhouses, while others will be cool and nimble notebook chips. In short, Intel is going to have perhaps its widest variety ever of so-called SKUs (stock-keeping units) to offer its customers, allowing them to choose among several chip versions to find the one that best fits their goals.

Just five years ago, the industry worked in a different way. There was little differentiation among PC companies like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway; everybody was cranking out bulky black desktops that sounded like jetliners or bulky notebooks with desktop processors that got two hours of battery life playing Minesweeper.

The market became all about price competition, and Dell rose to the top on the strength of its world-class manufacturing and assembly operation in central Texas. In their haste to keep up with Dell, everyone in the PC industry hustled to become lean and mean, and basic research and development into design techniques became a near afterthought.

That is, until 2005, when Apple announced its decision to switch to Intel's processors. Suddenly, the rest of the PC industry was on notice: they could no longer dismiss Apple as a sideshow act. Now their products were going to be held up against Apple's to an even greater degree, and that scared the hell out of several PC companies that had little to no experience in cutting-edge design.

Perhaps in return for enjoying a profit margin four times greater than that of its customers, Intel had been the one pushing the leading edge of PC design prior to 2005. It called for standards that would help reduce the costs of building PCs. It cajoled PC makers into adopting more interesting designs with its own set of concept products. And it recognized the growing importance of mobile computing with Centrino, a one-stop shopping experience for PC companies looking to build smaller, thinner notebooks.

That success emboldened Intel. PC companies, trying to recover from the collapse in business spending following the dot-com crash, were eager to cut costs and let Intel and Microsoft spend the money researching new ways to use PCs to grow the size of the market. Intel felt that with its reach, it had a better understanding of the PC market than any one vendor, and the smarts needed to take the industry where it needed to go.

Even if they don't want something like the MacBook Air, people now want stylish PCs, not cookie-cutter boxes.

(Credit: Corrine Schulze/CNET Networks)

Unfortunately, that only went so far. The platform strategy introduced by Intel CEO Paul Otellini, where Intel provides a pre-ordained set of components to PC makers, eventually showed its limits when it comes to predicting consumer tastes and styles in a changing market.

It wasn't that the strategy itself was flawed: PC makers definitely wanted the combo meal deal, where they could get the processor, chipset, and networking components fully assembled and tested. Even AMD, which for years criticized the idea of restricting "choice," jumped on board with the platform strategy after acquiring ATI Technologies.

It's just that at some point, Intel's ideas stopped resonating with its PC customers, as well as their customers. The Viiv digital home strategy has been a notable failure, as the general public has shown little interest thus far in putting a Windows PC at the center of their entertainment lives. At one point, Dell even forgot that it was supposed to be promoting the brand concept.

Earlier on, AMD became a serious player in this business because it listened to server customers who wanted no part of Intel's Itanium route to 64-bit processing. It came out with Opteron, a much cheaper yet still-powerful chip that preserved backward compatibility with software written for the x86 instruction set, and the rest is history.

Intel has changed a lot in the past decade. The company was left shaken and humbled by its clear misread of the market in the middle of the decade, and has vowed not to let it happen again. The trick now will be avoiding the same trap AMD fell into in 2006 and 2007.

Barcelona, AMD's first quad-core server processor, was the product of repeated customer requests for an integrated quad-core design, according to AMD executives. Faithful to its customers, AMD set off on building that chip, only to run into problems of nightmare proportions as it realized how "complicated" (in the words of CEO Hector Ruiz) that design would be to complete. Barcelona will ship at least a year later than expected as a result, and Intel cornered the quad-core server market by taking a less elegant but easier and quicker route to market.

Companies have to make leaps of faith from time to time. Just look at Apple; despite all the risk involved in switching to Intel's chips, it needed a lower-power chip if it wanted to stay relevant in a computer market where people were demanding laptops. Two years later, that has worked out pretty well.

But sometimes father does know best. Every now and then, you have to tell a customer who comes to you with a request that "no, it can't be done. And here's why." The bet-the-farm strategy can wind up leaving both you and the customer in the lurch if something goes awry.

Can Intel walk the fine line between management consultant and flexible supplier? It will be quite the balancing act for one of the world's largest tech companies, and one that historically at least, is used to pushing rather than pulling.

I've definitely learned something in recent weeks about reacting to the inevitable problems that will happen in life--how it can be possible to turn a problem into a huge opportunity, but also how a problem can become an even bigger problem overnight with neglect.

Perhaps it was inevitable for Apple this year, as the nearly unprecedented iPhone hype from this summer was followed by a surge in Mac shipments. Peeved by their experiences upgrading to Leopard, some high-profile Apple customers have taken to the Internet in recent weeks to complain, suggesting that Apple is leading them on with the brand promise of the Mac.

The launch of Leopard left some Apple customers wondering why it didn't 'just work.'

(Credit: Apple)

It's never clear in the early going exactly how many people as a whole run into problems with Macs, since things get quickly blown out of proportion under the intense scrutiny paid to Apple. But the basic complaint seems to be: this ain't what we thought it would be. Buggy upgrades? Security issues? This is why we switched to the Mac in the first place, right?

That's the image Apple wants people of have of the Mac: the anti-Windows. The clever Mac vs. PC commercials underscore that promise, pointing out some of the early problems with Windows Vista and smugly implying that Macs are free from such frustrations.

The problem is that's simply not true. Mac owners will encounter problems during the life of the product, maybe not as many as Windows owners, but frustrating, on-hold-with-tech-support types of problems will happen. Apple sets itself up for this kind of backlash with a holier-than-Windows marketing strategy if people run into some of the very problems they are trying to escape, such as blue screens of death. But how big a problem is this?

My friend Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates, back when we were trying to figure out if Microsoft and Intel had a chance at selling Windows Media Center PCs as digital living room hubs (they didn't), used to always note that people expect and are willing to tolerate a certain amount of "funk" from a PC. Basically, people are so used to encountering problems with Windows PCs that they have sort of gotten used to it, and while it's a hassle it's just part of using a PC.

Problems with Mac customers can actually be ways of winning them over permanently to your side.

(Credit: Apple)

But try taking away their TV. The consumer electronics industry tries to make simpler products that turn on instantly and don't require updated virus definitions or defragmenting or task management. They just work, and people aren't willing to tolerate anything less than a consumer electronics product that just works. I've put up with lots of PC issues over the years, but when the right half of my brand-new HDTV went snow white an hour into Boston College's first football game of the year, I was on the phone and livid in seconds. (Looking back, perhaps it was an omen.)

Apple has been trying to pitch the Mac as a consumer electronics device that "just works," against a Windows PC that sort of works. In general, I agree that Apple's attempt to set the bar higher and set itself apart from its Windows competitors is an excellent goal; most people would agree that competition makes for better business.

The trouble is, the Mac is still just a computer, and it's often subject to some of the same weirdness from time to time as Windows PCs. If Apple really wants to roll out its entire Mac ad campaign as a comparative exercise with the competition, it had better offer a much, much better experience; not just in terms of features and appearance, but with installation, troubleshooting, and support.

That last part is where the opportunity comes in. Back in 2005, a blogger named Jeff Jarvis started chronicling his harrowing experiences with Dell's PCs and customer service. Jarvis' goal was to cajole Dell into admitting that it had no idea of the scope of the customer service problems, which the company failed to do until it was really too late.

At the end of Jarvis' saga, he gave in to pressure from his readers and bought a Powerbook. To his credit, he realized right away that simply switching to Apple wasn't going to eliminate every computer hassle he'd ever encountered. "It feels like moving to Paris and not speaking French (though it sure is pretty there). There is as much illogic in part of the Mac world as in the Microsoft world," he wrote in 2005.

Not every new Apple customer is going to reach that conclusion. They are probably people who have had at least one or two Windows computers and many of them see the Mac as the answer to all their computer problems, even some who should probably know better.

If Apple fails to deliver that experience, those people might wonder what all the hype was about, and react as disproportionately as they did assuming Apple was the Answer. And long-time customers might feel slighted that in Apple's pursuit of new markets such as the iPod and the iPhone, they've let the fundamentals deteriorate. Although Apple's customer service scores are still the best in the industry, they did slip last year.

But any company can win customers for life if the first time they run into a problem with your product, you fix it quickly. The lesson from Dell's experience is that you can't let these customer service problems stagnate. Apple has a unique opportunity to act quickly on its customers' concerns because it controls the way its customers experience its products much more closely than any of its PC competitors.

Think about it: Dell and Hewlett-Packard do Microsoft's customer support. Best Buy and Circuit City sell HP and Acer's products. That's customer behavior information that has to pass through several different companies, and that can be difficult even if everybody has excellent working relationships.

If you're going to turn a problem into an opportunity, you have to be honest and up front with your customers about the scope of the problem, and act quickly--especially if they bought your product because you promised it was so much better than the other option. As I pointed out, Apple's customer satisfaction numbers are generally better than its competitors, but it will be interesting to see how those numbers change as the company adds new users on new products, such as the redesigned iMacs.

I have to admit, though, all this complaining about the brand promise of the Mac does make me laugh to a certain degree. Have you people ever seen a commercial before?

After a long investigation, I've also discovered that ladies won't necessarily flock to you as you walk down the street wearing Axe Body Spray, you shouldn't expect your Toyota Tacoma pickup to survive an encounter with the Loch Ness Monster, and switching to Salesgenie.com might not ensure that you can bring your cute 4-year-old daughter two new puppies with all the money you're now making.