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Nasty Bug Hits All Except the Macintosh - Again
Enjoy,
- louismg
Apple.com/iMac is Live
http://www.apple.com/imac/
What if you could fit your whole life — all your music, all your photos, all your movies, all your email — in a computer as fun and useful as an iPod? Now you can. Introducing the futuristic iMac G5 in 17- and 20-inch widescreen models. The entire computer, including a G5-based logic board, slot-loading optical drive, hard disk, speakers, and even the power supply — dwells inside the enchanting display. Modern living starts at $1299.
The Display is the Computer
Apple designers removed the extraneous, miniaturized the necessary, souped up the performance and concealed the result in immaculate perfection. The iMac G5 hangs suspended from a graceful anodized aluminum stand and its widescreen display lets you chat with several friends while you retouch photos, surf the web or scan email — and see everything at the same time. In fact, the 1680 x 1050 pixel resolution 20-inch display can show more than two full pages side by side. That’s 36% more screen area than the 17-inch, at 1440 x 900 pixels.
Technology Democratized
The iMac G5 brings the same innovative system architecture in Apple professional desktops to the home. The G5 processor makes everything zippier — connecting to email or the web, creating movies, songs and DVDs, arranging photos or playing music. Choose a 1.6 or 1.8GHz G5 processor that’s ready to run modern 64-bit applications under the secure and stable Mac OS X operating system. What’s more, the G5 speeds up Mac OS X and all the other included software, such as iLife ’04, Quicken 2004 and World Book.
All-in-One Ease
iMac G5 tucks away all the modern amenities in its two-inch thin(1) body, such as a slot-loading SuperDrive or Combo drive. Burn DVD slideshows of vacation photos or send friends a DVD with a special movie for the holidays. Back up your iTunes collection or make a mix CD for that special someone. Naturally, you can pop in your DVD movies and watch them in 16:10 widescreen letterbox format on the gorgeous LCD display. Your ears will hear pristine audio from built-in stereo speakers. Pointed down, the speakers bounce sound waves off your desk, counter or table into your ears.
Stay Connected
Of course the iMac G5 offers all the right ports to connect to your universe with ease. Starting with the new headphone jack that’s also a mini-optical plug. So you can watch DVDs and listen to them in 5.1 surround sound. You’ll also find a passel of USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 connectors for your camera, camcorder or gamepad. Or if you want to connect your iMac to your TV or a digital projector, the mini-VGA port gives you the option. The line in jack lets you record an electric guitar into GarageBand. iMac offers Ethernet for wired networking as well as a modem for dial-up Internet. Your modem can also double as a fax machine.
Go Wireless
Better yet, eliminate the desktop clutter of unnecessary cables with wireless connections to the Internet, your keyboard, mouse or cell phone. Pop an AirPort Extreme Card into your iMac, and you’re ready for the freedom of wireless networking from anywhere in your home or dorm — up to 150 feet from an AirPort Extreme Base Station. Or try AirPort Express with AirTunes to stream your music to your stereo and send documents to your printer. Plus, you can configure your iMac with internal Bluetooth to wirelessly access many devices that previously required cable. That means you can get an Apple Wireless Keyboard or Mouse to control your iMac from across the room, or sync your cell phone address book while your phone is in your purse, 30 feet away. Impress your friends, confound your enemies — wireless only looks like magic.
Extreme Graphics
The sizzling graphics processor and next-generation high-bandwidth architecture kicks 3D games and graphics into high gear, with three times the frame rate as the previous iMac in Unreal Tournament 2004. NVIDIA graphics provides hardware transform and lighting (T&L), per-pixel shading and drop-dead gorgeous effects at high resolutions. All models deliver over a billion textured pixels per second and an advanced Live FX engine engineered to generate the most lifelike characters. With Quartz Extreme, the graphics processors take over transform and lighting calculation functions from the CPU, freeing the G5 processor to perform essential system tasks faster than ever before.
US$1299 - 17" 256 MB RAM, 1.6 Ghz Combo Drive, 80 GB drive, 64 MB video card. This compares to US$1799 for the old starting iMac.
US$1499 - 17", with 1.8 GHz.
US$1899 - 20" display (1680 x 1050), 2.2" thick, 1.8 GHz G5, 256 MB RAM, 160 GB drive, SuperDrive, and same 64 MB video card.
Apple at Siggraph 2004
Apple has one of, if not THE largest, presences at Siggraph this year. They own the front booth immediately in the center of the event, and the glowing white apple can be seen from the street-level lobby, though the exhibition is taking place on the second floor, up the escalator.
They did debut "Motion" as final today, and signs that it is "Shipping from the Apple Store" were posted on their Borg-like black cube booth. There are also multiple aisles of G5 kiosks with the new displays showing CoreGL, a preview of Tiger (10.4), and their suites of professional digital applications.
In fact, last night, at least between 11:00 pm. and 2:30 a.m., when I was there, I can tell you they had their booth manned by security personnel and the aisles that eventually read "Production Suite", announced today, were covered in tape so that they could not be read by mischievous eyes.
Without question, the majority of systems and displays at this show are Mac OS X - and I am shocked at how many of the new Aluminum displays have made it to the different vendors - an amazingly quick standard. Some "not so good photos" can be seen on Mac Observer.
http://www.macobserver.com/gallery/siggraph1?page=2
Today was just the first day of three for the exhibition, and it has been packed. There isn't as much emphasis on XServe/XRAID at this show as there was at last year's show in San Diego, as the graphics tools (Shake/Final Cut Pro/Motion) have taken center stage.
- louismg
AirPort Express Does
What Apple Claims,
But It Still Falls Short
July 22, 2004; Page B1
The race to help consumers wirelessly stream music from their computers to their stereos continues apace. And now it has been joined by a real heavy hitter: Apple Computer.
Apple is uniquely positioned to do this job right. It was the first computer maker to offer Wi-Fi networking widely, and its iconic iPod portable music player makes it the unquestioned leader in digital music. So I tried out Apple's new $129 streaming gadget, AirPort Express, which not only transfers music wirelessly around a house but is also a full-fledged Wi-Fi base station.
Alas, I found that while AirPort Express works as promised, it falls far short of being an ideal solution for listening to computer-based music in a distant room.
The first thing to know about AirPort Express is that, like the iPod and iTunes, it works just as well with Windows PCs as it does with Apple's own Macintosh computers. You can use it happily in a Windows-only home.
The second thing to know is that, unlike most other music-streaming products, AirPort Express is a triple threat. You can use it as a base station for creating a Wi-Fi network, even if you never intend to stream music. You can connect it to an existing Wi-Fi network, so that it can stream music around the house. And, finally, if you have one of Apple's earlier Wi-Fi base stations, you can use the AirPort Express as a repeater, to extend the range of your wireless network.
The third thing to know about AirPort Express is that it's very small -- about the size of an iPod, only thicker and a bit wider. And it is designed to plug directly into a wall electrical outlet, like a power adapter does. You can easily carry it to a friend's house, or a hotel room, or a temporary office or dwelling, where you can plug it into a wired broadband connection and create a wireless network in a matter of minutes.
I tested AirPort Express as both a base station and a music-streaming device at both my home and my office. I tried it with both Macs and Windows computers, and with existing Wi-Fi base stations made by Apple itself and by Linksys.
Apple's setup software, called AirPort Express Assistant, is, in typical Apple fashion, simple and crystal clear, and it works the same whether on a Windows computer or a Mac.
As a base station, AirPort Express worked fine at both my home and office. It uses the newest and fastest flavor of Wi-Fi, called 802.11g, but it also supports computers using the older, slower 802.11b version. In my tests, the range of the AirPort Express was decent but not exceptional.
I also tested the AirPort Express as a music-streaming device in both locations. I set it up both times as part of my existing Wi-Fi networks. During the setup process, you are prompted to name each AirPort Express you are setting up with designations like "Family Room" or "Living Room."
This type of setup doesn't require you to connect the AirPort Express physically to your broadband modem or even to an Ethernet cable. You can just plug it into a wall outlet near a stereo or a set of powered speakers.
The setup was a breeze in my office, where my wireless network isn't password-protected and is driven by an older Apple base station. But at home, where I do use a password and a Linksys base station, the AirPort Express Assistant failed. I had to resort to a somewhat more complex software utility Apple also supplies to get the AirPort Express set up properly with my password.
Once you set up the AirPort Express, you can just plug it into any stereo receiver, boombox or set of powered speakers using a standard audio cable. You must also have the latest version of Apple's iTunes jukebox software, for Mac or Windows, which comes with the AirPort Express.
When the computer detects an AirPort Express connected to speakers, iTunes automatically displays a little pop-down menu at the bottom of its screen that lets you redirect the music it plays away from the PC's own speakers and into the remote speakers connected to the AirPort Express.
In my test at home, for instance, I selected "Dining Room." Instantly, the music started playing in the dining room, even though it is one floor down. This worked perfectly on both a Mac and a Windows computer.
There are limitations. You can send the music to only one location at a time, and you can't play it simultaneously through your computer and the remote speakers.
But the biggest problem with AirPort Express is more fundamental. Unlike most of its competitors, Apple's product lacks any remote control or remote user interface. If you are sitting in the room where the music is playing remotely, AirPort Express gives you no way to see what song, or play list, is currently playing, and no way to change the music. To get any information, or to change songs or play lists, you have to tromp back to the computer.
That's just unacceptable in a device of this kind. Apple hints that it will be addressing this problem in a future version or via some kind of add-on product. But it's surprising and disappointing that a company renowned for ease of use shipped a music-streaming product without those crucial capabilities.
NewsWeek: iPod Nation
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5457432/site/newsweek/
In just three years, Apple’s adorable mini music player has gone from gizmo to life-changing cultural icon
July 26 issue - Steve Jobs noticed something earlier this year in New York City. "I was on Madison," says Apple's CEO, "and it was, like, on every block, there was someone with white headphones, and I thought, 'Oh, my God, it's starting to happen'." Jonathan Ive, the company's design guru, had a similar experience in London: "On the streets and coming out of the tubes, you'd see people fiddling with it." And Victor Katch, a 59-year-old professor of kinesiology at the University of Michigan, saw it in Ann Arbor. "When you walk across campus, the ratio seems as high as 2 out of 3 people," he says.
They're talking about the sudden ubiquity of the iPod, the cigarette-box-size digital music player (and its colorful credit-card-size little sister, the Mini) that's smacked right into the sweet spot where a consumer product becomes something much, much more: an icon, a pet, a status indicator and an indispensable part of one's life. To 3 million-plus owners, iPods not only give constant access to their entire collection of songs and CDs, but membership into an implicit society that's transforming the way music will be consumed in the future. "When my students see me on campus with my iPod, they smile," says Professor Katch, whose unit stores everything from Mozart to Dean Martin. "It's sort of a bonding."
The glue for the bond is a tiny, limited-function computer with a capacious disk drive, decked in white plastic and loaded with something that until very recently was the province of ultrageeks and music pirates: digital files that play back as songs. Apple wasn't the first company to come out with a player, but the earlier ones were either low-capacity toys that played the same few songs, or brick-size beasts with impenetrable controls. Apple's device is not only powerful and easy to use, but has an incandescent style that makes people go nuts about it. Or, in the case of 16-year-old Brittany Vendryes of Miami, to dub it "Bob the Music Machine." ("I wanted to keep it close to my heart and give it a name," she explains.)
To three million plus owners, iPods not only give constant access to their entire collection of songs and CDs, but membership into an implicit society that's transforming the way music will be consumed in the future.
Adding to the appeal is the cachet of A-list approbation. "I love it!" says songwriter Denise Rich. "I have my whole catalog on it and I take it everywhere." She is only one voice in a chorus of celebrity Podsters who sing the same praises voiced by ordinary iPod users, but add a dollop of coolness to the device, as if it needed it. Will Smith has burbled to Jay Leno and Wired magazine about his infatuation with "the gadget of the century." Gwyneth Paltrow confided her Pod-love to Vogue (her new baby is named Apple—coincidence?). It's been seen on innumerable TV shows, movies and music videos, so much so that Fox TV recently informed Josh Schwartz, producer of its hit series "The O.C.," that future depictions of music players would have to forgo the telltale white ear buds. Schwartz, himself a 27-year-old who still hasn't recovered from the shock of having his unit stolen from his BMW, was outraged. "It's what our audience uses and what our characters would use," he says.
People who actually create music are among the biggest fans: "The layout reminds the musician of music," says tunester John Mayer. And couture maven Karl Lagerfeld's iPod collection is up to 60, coded in the back by laser etching so he can tell what's on them. "It's the way to store music," he says. Lagerfeld's tribute to the iPod is a $1,500 Fendi pink copper rectangular purse that holds 12 iPods. It is one of more than 200 third-party accessories ranging from external speakers, microphones and—fasten your seat belt—a special connector that lets you control your iPod from the steering wheel of a BMW.
Music hits people's emotions, and the purchase of something that opens up one's entire music collection—up to 10,000 songs in your pocket—makes for an intense relationship. When people buy iPods, they often obsess, talking incessantly about playlists and segues, grumbling about glitches, fixating on battery life and panicking at the very thought of losing their new digital friend. "I'd be devastated if I lost it," says Krystyn Lynch, a Boston investment marketer.
Fans of the devices use it for more than music. "It's the limousine for the spoken word," says Audible CEO Don Katz, whose struggling digital audiobook company has been revitalized by having its products on Apple's iTunes store. (Podsters downloaded thousands of copies of Bill Clinton's autobiography within minutes of its 3 a.m. release last month.) And computer users have discovered that its vast storage space makes it a useful vault for huge digital files—the makers of the "Lord of the Rings" movies used iPods to shuttle dailies from the set to the studio. Thousands of less-accomplished shutterbugs store digital photos on them.
iPods aren't conspicuous everywhere—their popularity seems centered on big cities and college towns—but sometimes it seems that way. "I notice that when I'm in the gym, as I look down the treadmills, that just about everybody in the row has one," says Scott Piro, a New York City book publicist. And the capper came earlier this year during the Apple vs. Apple case—wherein the Beatles' record company is suing the computer firm on a trademark issue. The judge wondered if he should recuse himself—because he is an avid iPod user. (The litigants had no objection to his staying on.)
In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to the then struggling company he had cofounded, he says, there were no plans for a music initiative. In fact, he says, there wasn't a plan for anything. "Our goal was to revitalize and get organized, and if there were opportunities we'd see them," he says. "We just had to be ready to catch the ball when it's thrown by life." After some painful pink-slipping and some joyous innovating, the company was solvent.
But in the flurry, Jobs & Co. initially failed to notice the impending revolution in digital music. Once that omission was understood, Apple compensated by developing a slick "jukebox" application known as iTunes. It was then that Apple's brain trust noticed that digital music players weren't selling. Why not? "The products stank," says Apple VP Greg Joswiak.
Life had tossed Jobs a softball, and early in 2001 he ordered his engineers to catch it. That February, Apple's hardware czar, Jon Rubinstein, picked a team leader from outside the company—an engineer named Tony Fadell. "I was on the ski slopes in Vail when I got the call," says Fadell, who was told that the idea was to create a groundbreaking music player—and have it on sale for Christmas season that year. The requirements: A very fast connection to one's computer (via Apple's high-speed Firewire standard) so songs could be quickly uploaded. A close synchronization with the iTunes software to make it easy to organize —music. An interface that would be simple to use. And gorgeous.
Fadell was able to draw on all of Apple's talents from Jobs on down. VP Phil Schiller came up with the idea of a scroll wheel that made the menus accelerate as your finger spun on it. Meanwhile, Apple's industrial designer Ive embarked on a search for the obvious. "From early on we wanted a product that would seem so natural and so inevitable and so simple you almost wouldn't think of it as having been designed," he says. This austerity extended to the whiteness of the iPod, a double-crystal polymer Antarctica, a blankness that screams in brilliant colors across a crowded subway. "It's neutral, but it is a bold neutral, just shockingly neutral," says Ive.
The October 2001 launch was barely a month after 9/11, with the country on edge and the tech industry in the toilet. Skeptics scoffed at the $399 price and the fact that only Macintosh users, less than a twentieth of the marketplace, could use it. But savvy Mac-heads saw the value, and the iPod was a hit, if not yet a sensation. What pushed it to the next level was a number of Apple initiatives beginning with a quick upgrade cycle that increased the number of songs (while actually lowering the price). Then Apple released a version that would run on Windows and Mac, dramatically increasing the potential market. Finally, after intense negotiations with the record labels, Apple licensed hundreds of thousands of songs for its iTunes Music Store, which blended seamlessly with the iPod. As with the iPod itself, the legal-download store was not the first of its kind but was so felicitous and efficient that it leapt to a 70 percent market share.
Then sales began to spike. No one was surprised that Apple sold an impressive 733,000 iPods during the Christmas season last year, but the normally quiet quarter after that saw an increase to 807,000. And last week Apple announced that sales in the just-completed third quarter, traditionally another dead one—hit 860,000, up from 249,000 a year ago.
That total would have been higher had Apple not had problems getting parts for the latest iteration, the iPod Mini. Though critics praised its compactness and its panache—a burnished metallic surface made it look like a futuristic Zippo—they sniffed at its relatively low capacity (only 1,000 songs!). But apparently there were lots of people like Los Angeles chiropractor Pat Dengler, who saw the Mini as a must. "At first I thought, I already have an iPod, I don't need it," she says. "But after I played with it, I thought, I really dig it. Now I use them both." Dengler was lucky, as many had to suffer through a monthlong waiting list. To the delight of Apple (and the chagrin of Sony), the no-brainer description of the iPod is "the Walkman of the 21st century." And just as the Walkman changed the landscape of music and the soundscape of our lives, the iPod and the iTunes store are making their mark on the way we handle our music, and even the way we listen to it.
The store has proved that many people will pay for digital music (though certainly many millions of gigabytes of iPod space are loaded with tunes plucked from the dark side of the Internet). "The iPod and iTunes store are a shining light at a very bleak time in the industry," says Cary Sherman, president of the Record Industry Association of America. Since just about everybody feels that within a decade almost everybody will get their music from such places, this is a very big.
An equally big deal is the way the iPod is changing our listening style. Michael Bull, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, has interviewed thousand of iPod users, finding that the ability to take your whole music collection with you changes everything. "People define their own narrative through their music collection," says Bull.
The primary way to exploit this ability is the iPod's "shuffle" feature. This takes your entire music collection, reorders it with the thoroughness of a Las Vegas blackjack dealer and then plays back the crazy-quilt melange. "Shuffle throws up almost anything—you don't know it's coming but you know you like it," says Bull. "Because of this people often say, 'It's almost as if my iPod understands me'."
Shuffle winds up helping people make connections between different genres of music. "People feel they're walking through musicology," says rock-er John Mayer. These abilities have a predictable effect: peo-ple who use iPods wind up listening to more music, and with more passion.
And since the iTunes store encourages customers to eschew buying entire CDs, instead buying the best song or two for a buck a pop, it's easy to see why some think that the era of the CD is playing its final tracks, a circumstance many will lament. "The one cool thing about a CD is really getting to know an album," says iPod fan Wil-Dog Abers, bassist for the hip-hop collective Ozomatli. "I don't know what we're gonna do about that."
In Silicon Valley, the question is what Apple can do to maintain its dominant position in the field. While Apple execs say that they are surprised at how lame the competition has been to date, it's reasonable to think that rivals might eventually close the gap. Almost all the hounds chasing Apple use technology from its longtime rival Microsoft. And Sony, whose initial efforts in the field were constrained by the copy-protection demands of its music unit, is introducing a new line of digital players this summer. "We feel that the experience is as good as Apple's, and we have the Walkman brand, which has sold 200 million units. We're in the game," says Sony America's CEO Howard Stringer. Meanwhile, the ultimate competition may come from services that stream unlimited music for a monthly fee, like Real Networks' Rhapsody. "The fat lady isn't even on the stage yet," says Chris Gorog, CEO of Napster.
But at the moment, the iPod is the category. And everything points to a humongous Christmas season for the iPod. The introduction of the new iPods this week extends the company's technology lead. If Apple, as promised, manages to get enough drives to satisfy the demand, the Mini iPod may achieve the ubiquity of its wide-bodied companion. And later this summer, when computer giant HP begins selling a co-branded version of the iPod, consumers will be able to get iPods in thousands of additional retail stores.
All this is infinitely gratifying for Steve Jobs, the computer pioneer and studio CEO who turns 50 next February. "I have a very simple life," he says, without a trace of irony. "I have my family and I have Apple and Pixar. And I don't do much else." But the night before our interview, Jobs and his kids sat down for their first family screening of Pixar's 2004 release "The Incredibles." After that, he tracked the countdown to the 100 millionth song sold on the iTunes store. Apple had promised a prize to the person who moved the odometer to 10 figures, and as the big number approached, fortune seekers snapped up files at a furious rate. At around 10:15, 20-year-old Kevin Britten of Hays, Kans., bought a song by the electronica band Zero 7, and Jobs himself got on the phone to tell him that he'd won. Then Jobs asked a potentially embarrassing question: "Do you have a Mac or PC?"
"I have a Macintosh... duh!" said Britten.
Jobs laughs while recounting this. Even though Macintosh sales have gone up recently, he knows that the odds are small of anyone's owning a Mac as opposed to the competition. He doesn't want that to happen with his company's music player. "There are lots of examples where not the best product wins," he says. "Windows would be one of those, but there are examples where the best product wins. And the iPod is a great example of that." As anyone can see from all those white cords dangling from people's ears.
Stock Ticker Prices via Dashboard
Did anybody notice the example stock prices on Apple's Tiger Dashboard site?
AAPL 42.05 +7.36
MSFT 18.23 -1.34
PIXR 92.23 +3.32
AMZN 5.23 +0.12
The image: http://images.apple.com/macosx/tiger/images/dashboardstock_20040628.jpg
The URL: http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html
Go go go...
- louismg
Apple's reinvention transforms stock's valuation
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/040708/bizfeature_tech_apple_1.html
Thursday July 8, 10:57 am ET
By Duncan Martell
SAN FRANCISCO, July 8 (Reuters) - The more than 50 percent rise in Apple Computer Inc.'s stock price this year has mirrored the brisk sales of its market-leading iPod digital music player and growth at its retail stores.
In the view of some analysts, the share price's ascent also reflects a transformation in the way investors are willing to value the Cupertino, California-based company, innovator of the first operating system to make personal computers friendly to everyday users.
Once seen as a value play that traded at little above its cash value, Apple's stock is now attracting long-term and momentum investors sold on Chief Executive Steve Jobs' vision of the company as a high-margin style-setter at the hub of an emerging "digital lifestyle."
Momentum investors typically look at trading patterns of stocks and the amount of money flowing into and out of them, while value investors tend to look for companies that are undervalued relative to their competitors.
Apple (NasdaqNM:AAPL - News) has sold more than 3 million of its market-leading iPod digital music players since their introduction in October 2001, and the company is approaching the 100 million mark on the number of tracks purchased on its iTunes online music store at 99 cents each.
"Longer-term investors are looking at it right now and saying Apple's got these great products out there and more coming and we trust them," said analyst Shannon Cross at Cross Research, while noting that there are now likely a sizable number of momentum investors in Apple.
The stock took a hit last week when the company announced plans for a next-generation iMac desktop computer, but said that it would miss its own internal schedule and won't ship the new one until September. The resulting sell-off took the shares down from their highest levels since 1999 and analysts reiterated their "buy" ratings, urging clients to take advantage of the price dip.
Even though the company's share of the PC market has been declining steadily in recent years and is now at about 2 percent worldwide, the company has built two sizable businesses in the past three years: the iPod franchise and its retail stores.
"It's a different kind of company you're buying today than you were four years ago when you were buying this PC company that you hoped would be able to reverse their losses in PC market share," said Dan Niles, chief executive of Neuberger Berman Technology Management, who owns Apple shares.
Niles said that Apple's 80 stores now account for $1 out of every $7 the company generates, and the stores boast gross margins of 40 percent. "It could be one of the biggest profit generators in the future," Niles said.
The maker of the Macintosh computer and iPod digital music players in its most recent quarter reported net income that more than tripled and gave a forecast that was above even the most optimistic expectations at the time.
Also, for the first time, the company sold more iPods in a quarter than its signature Mac computers, and iPod sales for that quarter even surpassed sales during the quarter that included the holiday shopping season.
Shares of Apple now trade at a lofty 50 times the fiscal 2004 per-share estimates of 61 cents a share calculated by analysts polled by Reuters Estimates. The stock trades at 37 times estimated fiscal 2005 per-share profit estimates and 34 times fiscal 2006 estimates.
Apple's stock is trading at about $30.25, down from a high above $32 in late June but still up sharply from a low near $19.70 in December.
"Part of it is betting on Steve Jobs," said technology analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, of the stock's rise. "Even though the Mac size of the business has not grown rapidly, he keeps pulling interesting rabbits out of his hat."
While the stock may appear overvalued given its strong performance this year, some investors believe the shares are likely to end the year still higher.
"You can make the argument that the valuation looks like it's getting stretched, but there are some very large upside possibilities in the third and fourth quarters," Niles said.
Since the introduction in January of the iPod mini, Apple hasn't been able to keep up with demand, but Niles said production will ramp later this summer as supplies of the tiny 1-inch drives the mini uses increase.
"The stock's had a nice run but we haven't taken our buy off the stock because we think there are still legs to the Apple story," Cross said.
Jobs agrees.
"We think that strategy still has a lot of legs," Jobs said in a recent interview, referring to the digital lifestyle. "If investors are catching up with us, that's terrific and hopefully they'll continue to follow us."
iMac 15-inch: 7-10 days shipping at Apple Store
Just for what it's worth, if you try to select the low-end iMac (with no special configurations), the Apple Store tells you the machine won't ship for another 7-10 business days...
If ThinkSecret believes there won't be a new iMac at WWDC, and we are accepting them as the opinion of record, how do we explain the above?
- louismg
WSJ: New Rivals Lurk In Music-Recording Industry
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 28, 2004; Page B1
On a recent hot, sticky afternoon in Dallas, Grammy Award-winning music producer Elliot Scheiner holed up in a specially outfitted trailer behind the Cotton Bowl. As Carlos Santana's band ran through a sound check at the Crossroads Guitar Festival, Mr. Scheiner moved sliders on a huge mixing board, pausing to bark out questions to engineers on the stage via intercom. The event, hosted by Eric Clapton, went out live over the Internet and now is being remixed by Mr. Scheiner for a pay-per-view broadcast, a Public Broadcasting System special and a DVD.
Pretty standard stuff for a veteran producer, except for how the 11-hour concert was recorded: on a special "digital audio workstation" powered by two Advanced Micro Devices Inc. microprocessor chips. "Amazing" is how Mr. Scheiner describes the machine's capabilities. "It's beyond ridiculous."
The rave review sounds an ominous note for Apple Computer Inc., whose machines have long been the tool of choice on the professional music-recording scene. The Macintosh has played a key role in the evolution of digital recording, and many musicians and engineers use the Mac with Pro Tools, a recording and editing program whose dominance in the field is comparable to Microsoft Corp.'s Word in word processing.
But the impressive power and falling prices of computers using chips from AMD and Intel Corp. is creating converts -- a concern for Apple in a market that is small in size but huge in prestige. Dave Lebolt, general manager of Pro Tools creator Digidesign, a unit of Avid Technology Inc., estimates that the Macintosh still has 90% market share among professional musicians. More budget-conscious musicians, though, use systems based on Intel or AMD chips, which account for 50% to 65% of music-software sold for hobbyist or consumer applications, he said.
"We are playing catch-up," to Apple, says Marty Seyer, the vice president in charge of AMD's microprocessor business. "In a matter of two years, the landscape will totally change."
Apple, meanwhile, insists it is aggressively defending its turf with dual-processor computers and new music software. "I see us increasing our lead over PCs, not that they are catching up," says Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of world-wide product marketing.
Computers have been a staple of the music-making business since the late 1980s, when the Mac began to be used. Some purists still prefer the sound quality afforded by tape and other "analog" tools, but newer digital technology has undeniable advantages. Cutting and pasting music phrases is now as simple as moving words on a screen. Other computer-aided tricks include borrowing "sampled" sounds from other recordings, remixing recordings to make new ones and electronically fixing out-of-tune vocals.
Music producer Elliot Scheiner (center), who says his non-Macintosh recording system is 'amazing'
The combination of the Macintosh and Pro Tools spawned a mini-industry of "plug-ins" -- add-on programs that simulate the sounds of particular instruments or effects. To handle so many chores, the software is typically used with an extra circuit board containing a special chip called a digital signal processor.
Some companies now see a simpler, cheaper route to complex orchestration: harnessing the microprocessor that handles a system's basic computing chores. That approach is being used with music software such as Nuendo, from Pinnacle Systems Inc.'s Steinberg unit, and Cakewalk's Sonar, which works only on Windows PCs. Avoiding add-on hardware saves money, but PCs haven't been powerful enough to handle many recording tracks and effects at the same time.
That is changing. AMD's Opteron microprocessor, in particular, has a high-speed technology for exchanging data with memory chips and other microprocessors. The design makes it easy to use two or more microprocessors in a single computer.
Under the urging of AMD Chief Executive Hector Ruiz, an amateur guitar player, the company has seeded famous record producers and engineers with Opteron-based systems. One user is Chuck Ainlay, a veteran Nashville producer and engineer and frequent collaborator with Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler.
Mr. Ainlay, who had used Macs with Pro Tools, says he shifted to Windows-based PCs about six years ago, lured by the promise of faster advances. He says his current Opteron-based system can manage unusually large numbers of audio tracks and plug-in effects.
"We are really starting to get high track counts and not be inhibited by the computers locking up," Mr. Ainlay says. "This thing is just rocking my world."
Verari Systems Inc., which built the workstation Mr. Scheiner uses, makes computers using both Intel and AMD chips. But the closely held San Diego company favors Opteron for music workstations. David Driggers, Verari's CEO, describes Opteron as "an extremely compelling platform."
Mr. Scheiner, the producer who has collaborated with groups such as the Eagles and Steely Dan, used a Macintosh for office tasks but found it unreliable when he briefly tried the Mac for recording in the 1990s. His Verari workstation, by contrast, "has never crashed," he says.
Such talk provokes heated arguments from Macintosh fans, such as Neil Mclellan, a British engineer who uses Pro Tools to record such acts as Prodigy, known for electronic dance music. He insists that the Mac OS X operating system is more reliable than Microsoft's Windows XP, less frequently targeted by computer viruses and easier to customize with add-on hardware and software.
Indeed, Apple believes it has a fundamental advantage when people make music by plugging real instruments or software synthesizers into its computers. With PCs, it points out, users often experience slight delays, known as latency, that can make it harder to synchronize musical tracks. Mac OS X has a technology called Core Audio that reduces the problem.
On the software front, Apple's Mr. Schiller points to Mac programs such as Logic Pro, Soundtrack and Garageband, a free part of OS X that aids composition with thousands of prerecorded musical riffs and sequences. He also says the dual-processor G5 Mac, powered by an International Business MachinesCorp. chip, is considerably faster than most PCs powered by Intel and AMD chips and is widely available in retail stores, starting at $1,999. Dual-processor PCs, such as Verari's $2,600 workstation, often must be specially ordered.
But the PC world has more competing makers of chips and computers, spurring rapid price declines and new features. Intel just introduced new accessory chips that sharply speed the rate at which its microprocessors can transfer music and other data.
Digidesign's Mr. Lebolt says technical capabilities between Windows PCs and Macs have essentially reached parity. Over time, he says, users will be mostly swayed by what music application software is available, and their familiarity with the Windows or Mac operating systems.
"There is a longtime allegiance in the creative community to Apple that has built up over time," Mr. Lebolt says. "That's changing a bit."
WSJ: Is Apple Losing Its Sheen?
Its iPod Is Still a Hot Player, But Core Macintosh Sales Lag Behind Overall Market
By PUI-WING TAM
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 28, 2004; Page B1
David Foley, a reseller of Apple Computer Inc. products in Philadelphia, is having a quiet summer. So far, sales of Apple's sleek G5 desktop computers and iBook laptops have been a "tiny bit on the slow side," he says. Other Apple Macintosh models, such as PowerBook laptops, have been moving at a "more consistent level" at his Bundy Computer Co., he notes, with sales up about 5% over last year.
Still, Mr. Foley concludes, "We're not setting the world on fire."
This is a problem for Apple, which convenes its annual world-wide developer conference in San Francisco today. The innovative computer maker, headed by Chief Executive Steve Jobs, has lately been showered with acclaim for its iPod digital music players and its iTunes Music Store download service. But amid the hoopla, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company is facing a dilemma: As the rest of the personal-computer market recovers from the protracted technology downturn, Apple's mainstay computer business isn't participating in the resurgent growth.
APPLE'S CORE
Even as overall PC shipments grew 12% in 2003, Apple's computer shipments were flat for the year, according to research firm Fulcrum Global Partners. At the end of March, Apple dropped out of research firm IDC's top 10 list of world-wide computer makers for the first time ever. Apple's share of the global computer market has eroded across the home, business and government markets over the past year, dropping to 1.7% overall at the end of March, down from 1.8% in early 2003, says Gartner (though its share is up in the education market). And in the company's last fiscal quarter, Apple's computer sales were sequentially flat or down across all models, particularly for its flagship iMac desktops.
The trend lines are worrisome because, despite the success of the iPod, computers are still Apple's core business. The music players account for just 14% of overall Apple revenue while Macintosh computers make up most of the rest. What's more, the Macintosh is slightly more profitable for Apple than the iPod. Macintosh gross margins are 23%, according to Wall Street analysts. Gross margins for the iPod stand at 22% and are predicted to decline because of creeping competition in the music player market.
"The bottom line is, where's the money? And for Apple, the money still sits in the PC market," says Charles Smulders, an analyst at Gartner.
Behind Apple's disappointing computer sales is a lack of compelling reasons to buy a new Macintosh, say some customers. While Apple has bumped up the speed and power of its G5 desktops and PowerBook and iBook laptops this year, it hasn't incorporated any big breakthroughs as it has done in the past. Its distinctive iMac desktop, with its egg-like base, has been relatively unchanged for several years and is due for an overhaul. Macintoshes also continue to be priced at a premium to Windows-based PCs, with most Apple computers typically going for well over $1,000 while some basic Windows PCs can be had for $600 or even less.
Emanuel Ruffler, a founder of Mac-Tech, a New York firm of Apple technicians that caters to graphics designers and other creative professionals, says his clients are unlikely to buy new Macintoshes until the machines are better equipped to handle robust applications such as high-definition video. "At this point, if you have a Macintosh from the last few years and it's working fine, there's just no reason to buy new hardware," Mr. Ruffler says. An Apple spokesman declined to comment for this article.
In a recent interview, Mr. Jobs said the "Mac business is doing very well," stressing the company's profitability and goal to increase its base of Macintosh users beyond the current 25 million. "We're trying to do everything we can" to boost Mac market share," said the CEO in a separate interview. He added that the Macintosh division of the company is busy "working on a lot of different stuff."
Apple is planning to launch some new products soon. At its San Francisco developer conference, designed to inspire independent software makers to create more applications for the Macintosh platform, Apple will preview the latest version of its Mac OS X operating system, dubbed Tiger. With cooler graphics and easier maneuverability than its Panther predecessor, Apple is hoping that Tiger will excite more of its followers.
Behind the scenes, the company is working on other projects to jazz up the Macintosh. Among them: next generation word-processing and productivity software, according to a person familiar with the matter. Apple has also made several strategic hires to boost its computer business over the past year and a half, recruiting executives from Adobe Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Critical Path Inc. as vice presidents, says a person familiar with the matter.
Attempts to recruit new users to its proprietary systems, however, have faltered. Apple has launched dozens of company-owned retail stores across the country, and spends millions of dollars a year on slick ads to tout such things as Macintosh's eye-popping software, such as its iPhoto system for digital photos. Yet most of the company's advertising is devoted to the iPod and iTunes -- a fact that turns out to be something of a Catch-22: Resellers like Mr. Foley in Philadelphia say that iPod buyers sometimes wander over to the computer displays in his showroom, but that the music players -- by now practically a fashion accessory -- rarely translate into new Macintosh sales. Apple has acknowledged the disconnect, having said in the past that the iPod isn't intended to drive Macintosh purchases.
In May, Apple reorganized to create an iPod division that is separate from the Macintosh hardware group. The company assigned Jon Rubinstein, formerly the head of Macintosh hardware and an Apple veteran who has worked alongside Mr. Jobs for years, to lead the new unit.
Many of Apple's recent announcements also have centered around strengthening its lead in digital music. Earlier this month, Apple released the AirPort Express base station, which helps transmit music wirelessly from a computer to a home stereo. It followed this move by launching its iTunes Music Store for the British, French and German markets. Last week, Apple introduced a special adapter that integrates the iPod with the stereo systems of certain BMW models.
Despite the focus on digital music, some Apple resellers say the beat of their Macintosh sales goes on. Don Mayer of Small Dog Electronics Inc. in Waitsfield, Vt., for instance, says his company is experiencing 10% to 15% sales growth from a year ago across most Macintosh categories. The only model where sales are "flatter" is the iMac, he notes. But overall, "we see pretty steady growth in the marketplace," Mr. Mayer says.
Others are less sanguine about their slowing Macintosh business. One reseller in the Midwest, who declined to be named, said his Macintosh sales are down 25% from a year ago. "This isn't a seasonal blip," said the reseller. "Apple isn't successful because its computers are priced higher than Windows PCs. If Apple would just sell for less, they just might get a higher market share."
Fahrenheit 9/11 a Perfect 10
My wife and I spent our late-Saturday evening seeing Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, an unapologetically partisan documentary on the events and relationships leading to the 2001 terrorist attacks, and subsequent rally toward storming Iraq, deposing of Hussein, and the instilling of variable terror alerts nationwide in the name of homeland security.
Unlike more common newsfare, Moore's in-your-face style and dogged investigations provide the audience with an array of behind-the-scenes footage from the white house administration, the heart-wrenching loss of a son in Iraq by a middle-class Flint, Michigan family, and a seeming "ride-along" with US soldiers on Christmas Eve as they storm a family's home in Baghdad and pluck a college-age man from the home as his mother and family look on, screaming and wailing in terror.
Moore's movie is intended to display that Bush and his administration did not without question obtain the presidency, that they were slow to pick up on the growing terror threat, and even slower to respond to it when news broke of the World Trade Center casualties. It further displays family and business relationships with the Saudi royal family and the Bin Laden family itself, which may have led to a less thorough investigation and fact-finding after the attacks.
While it is clear where Moore's political leanings fit, he is an equal-opportunity assassin, lambasting Democratic leaders for supporting the Patriot Act without having read it, for supporting the war on Iraq, and for not finding a single Senator willing to back up minority-led questions surrounding irregularities in the 2000 Florida election results - and also being unable to find a single congressman willing to send their son or daughter to Iraq to serve in the military.
This movie is not a comedy - while there are some very amusing situations showing a bumbling president and his cohorts, the emotions that run through you are those of absolute despair for the families impacted by war, and a growing feeling of frustration and anger, as the amassed atrocities keep coming.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is a must-see, regardless of your political leanings. You will learn new things, and leave with plenty of new questions. The film, sold out yesterday for all showings, including our 10:30 p.m. slot, is setting documentary records this weekend - and has reached #1 on the box office, despite appearing in 1/4 the theaters as more-common fare.
WSJ: The Music Man
Apple CEO Steve Jobs Talks
About the Success of iTunes,
Mac's Future, Movie Piracy
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 14, 2004; Page B1
Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple Computer Inc., was the first rock star of the technology business. In 1977, with his partner Steve Wozniak, he developed the first successful mass-market personal computer, the Apple II. Then, in 1984, he reinvented the personal computer by leading the development of the Macintosh.
Mr. Jobs left Apple for a while and, among other things, developed Pixar Animation Studios, whose latest film, "Finding Nemo," topped the box office last year.
Apple's hottest recent product has been the iPod portable music player, which is tightly tied to Apple's pioneering legal music-downloading service, iTunes. Consumers have bought more than three million iPods, and Apple says the device holds a 52% share, measured in units, of the digital music-player market. The iTunes store has sold over 85 million songs.
Last week, Mr. Jobs sat down with the Journal's Walter S. Mossberg for a rare onstage conversation at the second annual D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif. Excerpts:
Walt Mossberg: You've been the leader in legal music downloading. Where does it stand today?
Steve Jobs: We have about 70% market share of the legal downloads, which is great. But if you look at everybody together -- 100% of the legal download market -- we've gone from pretty much zero a year ago to about 2% of the legally sold music in the U.S. That's not a giant number, but if you look at it and say it's been accomplished in a year and you look at the trajectory, it's not inconceivable to see it breaking through 5% in the next 24 months as an example, maybe sooner.
How about the illegal downloading side, though? It's still bigger than what you're doing, right?
It's big, yeah. And that's what we compete with really. We compete really with piracy.
Let's talk about the record labels for a minute. One year into this, when you only have this 2% share, and there's still a ton of piracy out there, they're actually discussing raising the price of singles. What's going to happen if they say to you, "Our hot new singles have to be $1.29, not 99 cents?"
Mr. Jobs: Well, we've just finished renewing our deals with the music companies. And we had to express our opinion fairly strongly that we think the customer doesn't want to pay more than 99 cents for a song. And it turns out the music companies make more money when we sell a song for 99 cents than they do when they sell it on a CD. The prices aren't going up on iTunes, I can tell you that.
Is Apple's future going to continue to be as a company that primarily creates and sells computers? Are we seeing the beginning of a change in the nature of the company?
Mr. Jobs: Well, clearly we're doing some new stuff. I mean, the iPod grew from nothing to a billion-dollar-a-year business by year two. However, if you look at the core of Apple, what Apple is great at is figuring out how to invent cool technology but making it wonderfully easy to use. That's what we have always done. That's what the Mac was. That's what a lot of things we do are.
The needle on Mac market share has not moved in any significant way up. It's under 5%. But I've seen you say that, with the iPod, it's refreshing to not be in single-digit market share.
It is.
Does that foretell a broadening of the company to doing other digital devices that are not full-blown computers?
You have to wait and see. We don't want to get into something unless we can invent or control the core technology in it. And the more we look at it, for more and more consumer devices the core technology in them is going to be software. More and more they look like software in a box. And a lot of traditional consumer-electronics companies haven't grokked [fully understood] software.
Does that mean that you'd be interested at least in looking at some of these other products over time?
We look at a lot of things but I'm as proud of the products that we have not done as I am of the ones we have done.
What's your favorite thing you've not done?
A PDA. We got enormous pressure to do a PDA and we looked at it and we said, "Wait a minute, 90% of the people that use these things just want to get information out of them, they don't necessarily want to put information into them on a regular basis and cellphones are going to do that." So getting into the PDA market means getting into the cellphone market. And you know, we're not so good at selling to the enterprise where you've got, in the Fortune 500, five hundred orifices called CIOs. In the cellphone market you've got five. And so we figured we're not going to be very good at that.
Is there any prospect for a significant increase in Mac market share?
You know, we've got 25 million customers. We've got a retail store business that's now over a billion dollars and bringing in a lot of new customers. Over half the customers that we're selling CPUs to in our retail stores are new to Mac. So I think we've got a very healthy customer base and we love them and we love to delight them with new products, and that's a very healthy business; it's growing.
Let's talk about the computer as the "digital hub." Do you still hold to your idea that the Mac or the PC is the center of the digital world?
Oh yeah. I mean, where are you going to put your 5,000 digital photographs? You're not going to put them on your cellphone for safekeeping.
Small hard disks probably will show up in phones at some point; they'll show up in digital cameras. Won't that change the game?
You won't want to have the only copy of your pictures on the camera or the cellphone because if you lose it, there goes your life.
What about portable video?
We don't see a market for people that want to watch video on these portable devices. What's happening is to build in video, some companies are making [these devices] twice as heavy as an iPod and twice the size of an iPod, so they don't fit in your pocket, and twice as expensive as an iPod.
You've been criticized forever for not playing in the low end of the PC market. Is the iPod your $400 computer?
Yeah, we actually approached it that way. We said we're going to invest in the iPod rather than a PDA and we also said it looks a lot like a $400 computer. And for us the volume is pretty good, so yes. But we want to make them cheaper still. I mean, we're not happy with iPods costing $300 and $400 and we want to keep driving the prices down on them so we're working very hard on that.
A lot of music is likely to be available in formats I can't play on my iPod today.
Like what?
Like [Microsoft Corp.'s] Windows Media Format. Why should I as a consumer have to have a limitation on my device because you have a religious war with [Microsoft Chairman] Bill Gates? Are you against consumer choice?
No. Right now we've got a choice to make ourselves, which is should we spend our energy enhancing the music store and enhancing the iPod in the format that has 70% of the business or should we take some of that energy and stop innovating and go back and try to play Windows Media, which has 30% or less of the market. And we've chosen right now to go with the 70% format. We really believe that we can innovate much more if we control that technology.
So what if they get to 50%?
Well, then let's talk again.
When you look around the economy in general right now do you think tech is back fully? Will it ever be back to where it was in the boom? Where do you think we are in the cycle?
Apple grew 30% last quarter. It was our third quarter of growth, and we're going to have some good growth this quarter I hope. So as far as we're concerned, things are definitely looking up, both the computer business and the music business.
Last year, you talked about the differences in personality between creative people and technology people. It's a year later; do you see any more kind of comity there, any more coming together of those cultures?
Yeah, a little bit, but it's slow going, because they don't understand each other at all. The Hollywood studio heads invited several people down -- [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer, [Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairman and CEO] Carly Fiorina, myself and others to talk about this whole piracy issue because they are trying to get ahead of the curve and figure out what to do. It's great that those things take place, but there's a big gulf.
And the attitude problem is on both sides?
No, I don't think there's an attitude problem, there is just an experience problem -- that people from technology don't understand the creative process that these companies go through to make their products, and they don't appreciate how hard it is. And the creative companies don't appreciate how creative technology is; they think it's just something you buy. And so there is a gulf of understanding between the two of them.
The interesting thing about movies though is that movies are in a very different place than music was. When we introduced the iTunes Music Store there were only two ways to listen to music: One was the radio station and the other was you go out and buy the CD.
Let's look at how many ways are there to watch movies. I can go to the theater and pay my 10 bucks. I can buy my DVD for 20 bucks. I can get Netflix to rent my DVD to me for a buck or two and deliver it to my doorstep. I can go to Blockbuster and rent my DVD. I can watch my DVD on pay-per-view. I can wait a little longer and watch it on cable. I can wait a little longer and watch it on free TV. I can maybe watch it on an airplane. There are a lot of ways to watch movies, some for as cheap as a buck or two.
And I don't want to watch my favorite movie a thousand times in my life; I want to watch it five times in my life. But I do want to listen to my favorite song a thousand times in my life.
So they're really different animals and the movie industry is far more mature in its distribution strategies than the music industry was. So they're really in very different places.
The other thing is that people are much more attuned to visual quality than audio quality. What was the successor to the CD format? MP3, a lower-quality format but one that provided a convenience of being able to transmit music over the Internet that no other format had.
But that's not going to be the case with video. With video, people have ratcheted up to the DVD format and no one is going to go back to VHS quality just because they can download it faster over the Internet. It ain't going to happen. So to download a DVD-quality movie takes hours over most people's broadband connections.
And therefore the threats to Hollywood are very different than the threats to the music industry, and actually the biggest threat to Hollywood isn't the Internet. The biggest threat to Hollywood is DVD burners. And likewise the Internet might not be as big of an opportunity.
WSJ: Has Jobs Gone Hollywood?
By PUI-WING TAM and SARAH MCBRIDE
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 14, 2004; Page B1
Steve Jobs stirred controversy a few years ago with his "Rip, Mix, Burn" advertising campaign, which encouraged consumers to use their computers to copy music. But when it comes to the consumer's ability to copy future generations of the DVD movie format, Mr. Jobs is sending a very different message.
At a recent private meeting with Hollywood studio heads and tech czars like Microsoft Corp.'s Steve Ballmer and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Carly Fiorina, Mr. Jobs argued that studios shouldn't license their movies for use in the planned "high-definition DVD" format until Hollywood is assured by the tech industry that the discs can't be copied by new DVD burners that will come along. High-definition DVDs are being developed as a successor to the current digital-video-disc format and are expected to be on the market by next year, along with high-definition DVD burners.
Mr. Jobs even suggested that high-definition DVD burners not be bundled with computers at all -- a scenario he said in an interview was "extreme" and one that "I hope we don't have to get to, but it helps to put the issue in perspective." He said it is up to the tech industry to prove to Hollywood that high-definition content can be adequately protected.
In making his argument, Mr. Jobs -- chief executive of both Apple Computer Inc. and film studio Pixar Animation Studios -- signaled that he is for now siding with Hollywood, rather than Silicon Valley, when it comes to protecting movie content from pirates. By choosing to wear his self-described "Pixar hat," he is underlining the tricky position he must navigate as the head of companies in both industries.
His stance also touches on a possible shift in the debate over movie piracy. The Hollywood studios, eager to spare themselves from the online piracy that has contributed to a steep decline in music sales, have said repeatedly in recent years that they won't let the same thing happen to them.
But some film-industry leaders believe that the threat of online movie piracy is still fairly remote because the size of a movie file is too big and most home computers aren't yet hooked up to televisions, where consumers prefer to watch movies. Further, to defeat the encryption used to protect DVDs, it's often necessary to download all kinds of code-breakers from the Internet. Meanwhile, the threat of physical piracy made possible by professional DVD burners appears to be a more real near-term problem.
Today's key culprit "is the guy in Guangdong, or the guy in Uzbekistan, who is making, printing copies of DVDs," says Yair Landau, vice chairman of Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Entertainment and president of Sony Pictures Digital.
That's not the way it looked to many Hollywood executives just two years ago, when five studios jointly launched online movie-download service Movielink to give consumers an alternative to illegally downloading movies. The idea of the venture -- jointly owned by Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., General Electric Co.'s Universal Pictures, Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. -- was to fend off online piracy before it could even take hold.
But today, Movielink remains in its infancy. It overcame an initial problem of slow downloading, but people close to the venture say some studios don't place the same priority on it that they once did. For starters, the partners are weary of arguing among themselves over how the service should be run. Several executives close to Movielink say there has been talk of selling it or bringing in an outside partner to run it. "Each of the studios has its own position, and Movielink is always considering growth options," says Jim Ramo, Movielink's chief executive officer.
The movie industry has also not yet followed the music industry's lead in suing individuals who allegedly engage in illegal online file-sharing. But movie makers recently have been doing a lot to thwart physical piracy, calling attention to big raids on alleged DVD bootlegging operations that have been conducted in places like Atlanta, where authorities recently seized thousands of movie and music discs.
This week, Motion Picture Association of America Chief Executive Jack Valenti warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that burning copies of movies is epidemic in places like China, Russia and Brazil. In the U.S., the movie industry has been filing lawsuits against the makers of a popular DVD-copying software.
Most Hollywood leaders see the next generation of DVDs as an exciting opportunity for the expansion of their business once the market has been saturated with the current generation of movie discs. The industry is working with two leading consortiums that are developing next-generation DVDs, hoping to ensure robust digital copyright protection.
"Bootlegging is a manageable issue," says Jeff Bewkes, chairman of Time Warner's Entertainment and Networks Group. "It has always been with us, and will always be with us, and will be managed as it has been."
Studios figure it's too late to thwart piracy of today's DVDs, but they still have a chance to protect their high-definition output. That's why Mr. Jobs spoke up at the recent summit, the latest in a series of meetings at which leaders in the two industries exchange views.
H-P and Microsoft have invested in high-def DVDs -- H-P as part of a consortium developing a high-def DVD format known as "Blu-ray," while Microsoft is working to license its technology for use in another high-def DVD format (though Microsoft says it's willing to work with Blu-ray too).
Microsoft's CEO, Mr. Ballmer, declined to comment on the meeting. But Jason Reindorp, a Microsoft group manager who is involved in high-definition DVD formats, says Mr. Jobs's stand displayed a "lack of understanding" about the format and showed how he was "trying to muddy the waters." Mr. Reindorp says protection of Hollywood content is a high priority.
Mr. Jobs acknowledges that his stance was "not a popular position" with the technology-industry leaders in attendance.
Airport Express Ordered, and Will Ship Mid-July
I'll keep you posted for how long it takes to get here, and then of course how well it works.
- louismg
TiVo Launches "New Music Tuesdays"
Can you believe that?
Where did they get the idea?
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040609/sfw008a_1.html
Best Buy and TiVo to Provide Subscribers 'New Music Tuesdays'
Wednesday June 9, 11:10 am ET
Each Week TiVo(R) Series2(TM) Subscribers Can Sample New Music From Best Buy's 'New Releases'
NEW YORK, June 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO - News) and Best Buy (NYSE: BBY - News), the nation's leading specialty retailer of digital technology and entertainment products and services, have teamed up to deliver to TiVo Series2 subscribers new music from today's most popular artists. The first in a series of new music releases available to TiVo subscribers will be music from Universal Music Group. TiVo Series2 subscribers with a broadband connection can now take advantage of the home media features included in the service to stream select new music releases beginning today.
"TiVo's new home media features provide Best Buy with a creative way to promote artists' new releases and expand our reach to consumers," said Jennifer Schaidler, vice president of Music at Best Buy. "We are excited to be able to offer this unique service to TiVo subscribers."
"We are thrilled to be able to offer our subscribers more ways to access digital content they love, in the comfort of their living room," said Brodie Keast, executive vice president and general manager, TiVo service. "TiVo's home media features make it easy and convenient for Series2 subscribers to sample new music each week from Best Buy's new releases."
New TiVo Service Features
As of today, TiVo Series2 subscribers can do more things the TiVo way -- easily and effortlessly. Now with home media features included in the standard TiVo subscription rate, all TiVo Series2 subscribers with a broadband connection can automatically use these new service features to schedule recordings from the Internet, move content between two or more TiVo Series2 boxes in the home, and enjoy digital music and photos in their full glory on the big screen or home stereo in the living room. The TiVo service is available for $12.95/month for the first DVR and $6.95/month for each additional DVR in the same household, or for a one-time product lifetime fee of $299 for each DVR.*
iPod Mini Supply
Lisa, the Valley Fair retail store said on Friday that they hadn't received any iPod minis in the last week (and no Pinks in the last 3 weeks). She suggested those ordering on the Web were being served first.
No word on when this was to be improved.
- louismg
Great iTunes Companion Site: MusicMobs.com
You can now catalog your iTunes playlists using iTunes Catalog from Kavasoft.com and post them to a music community called MusicMobs.com, which lets you see what are the most popular artists and songs, and find other artists similar to your own liking.
My personal iTunes library published:
http://www.musicmobs.com/user.php?userId=4911
The software you need:
http://www.kavasoft.com/iTunesCatalog/index.html
Enjoy,
- louismg
Re: Sex in the City Ad
Bootz,
Start here:
http://adtunes.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3657&hl=sex+in+the+city
"Do Ya" by ELO.
- louismg
High Costs for Backup (Re: Atempo)
LJK, while we may be used to Apple in a consumer or education environment, as Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server devices become more prevalent in business environments, as trends have shown, enterprise applications and developers like Atempo will be offering solutions like this.
The pricing for Atempo is in line with the pricing they charge to back up other network storage devices in a corporate infrastructure. This isn't some consumer-oriented application intended to replace Iomega. Storage administrators are used to paying thousands and tens of thousands for products like this.
- louismg
Mac Market Ripe for Backup Software Boon
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid5_gci963487,00.html
Atempo Inc. wants to back up your Macintosh. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based software maker announced that its Time Navigator data protection product supports the latest version of the Mac OS X Server version 10.3 operating system.
There are roughly 23 million Macintosh machines in use and about 40% of those systems are running Mac OS X. Add to that Apple Computer Inc.'s recent launch of the XRAID storage array and the XSAN storage area network file system, and there's suddenly a backup market, albeit a small one.
"Atempo is making a smart move putting an emphasis on supporting Mac OS X," said Tony Asaro, a senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, Inc. "Reference data is one of the fastest areas of storage growth and Macintosh-based applications are driving much of this."
The analyst firm reports that reference information, such as documentary imagery, digital photos, e-mail archives and medical images will grow at a rate of 92 % per year through 2005.
Perhaps Atempo isn't barking up the wrong tree. Macintosh users running Mac OS X Server version 10.3 -- codenamed "Panther" -- on Power Mac G4 and Power Mac G5 machines will be able to use Atempo's Time Navigator to perform backups to virtual tape libraries and disk-to-disk backup systems, as well as synthetic full backups with centralized and remote management capabilities.
According to Data Mobility Group Inc. founder and senior analyst John Webster, the Macintosh backup market has been owned by Dantz Development Corp.'s Retrospect Backup product family for years, but Atempo believes its Time Navigator software offers more features and functions than competing backup packages.
Dantz was first out of the gate with support for Panther, and its product costs about $1,000, thousands less than Atempo's Time Navigator's $4,600 price tag. But Atempo's software has an edge when it comes to features and support.
Dantz Retrospect Backup supports most SCSI and Fibre Channel tape libraries, no limit to the size of volumes that can be backed up and used as backup to multiple FireWire or USB hard drives. Atempo supports the new class of disk-based systems, such as Quantum's DX30, NetApp's NearStore and StorageTek's BladeStore. Atempo also offers Dynamic Library Sharing in SANs and NDMP support for network-attached storage systems from EMC Corp., Network Appliance Inc. and others.
Randy Batterson, director of strategic alliances for Atempo, said Apple doesn't have any storage software vendors supporting backup and restore for their enterprise users. "There are people out there with client support, but not server support. We'll offer both," he said.
Microsoft Releases Expected Longhorn PC System Specs
"Microsoft is expected to recommend that the "average" Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today."
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1581842,00.asp
Can WalMart offer those for $199?
- louismg
Webcast on Apple Storage Strategy, Information Lifecycle Management
--- From a ComputerWorld Newsletter ---
Apple/Enterprise Storage Group ILM webcast
Information Lifecycle Management experts can show you how to manage vast amounts of data while keeping your overhead low. In this seminar webcast, Enterprise Storage Group analyst Steve Kenniston talks with Apple Product Manager Alex Grossman. Sign up today to get the IT perspective on the hottest topic in storage.
http://seminars.apple.com/seminarsonline/ilm/apple/index.html?s=7
------------------------------------
The actual seminar page can be found here, with the archived webcast.
http://seminars.apple.com/seminarsonline/ilm/apple/index1.html
Enjoy,
- louismg
Re: XSAN
Yofal and all, my apologies for not responding earlier, but I've been on a much-undeserved vacation, and am just now catching up.
With the Xserve and XRAID, Apple is doing a great job of offering entry-level to mid-level low-cost storage solutions, which compare adequately with HP and Dell. They have been adopted primarily in the biotech and entertainment markets - with the highest-profile win at Virginia Tech with their supercomputer (formerly regular G5s and being updated to Xserves).
With Xsan, Apple is addressing some severe limitations in the scalability of their product, and on a capacity standpoint, bringing it more in line with mid-range network storage players, like Network Appliance, by clustering multiple file systems together to one file system with a maximum of 16 terabytes. Keep in mind that there are other offerings out there with file system sizes of 256 terabytes behind a single system, and in alternative configurations, vendors often are resorting to what's called a global file system, often in partnership with NuView.
A big benefiit to the Xsan offering is the fact it's only $999. It's easy to expect that competitors offer their clustering "solutions" for significantly higher prices, as a "benefit" to the customer. I could easily go on a long-winded rant here about how the computer industry is the only one where customers are willing to purchase dozens, hundreds or thousands of products to evade fundamental limitations in the offerings – somehow rewarding companies for avoiding innovation, and instead providing a band-aid.
Instead of loading them down customers with an overwhelming array of individual machines, what vendors should be pressing toward is delivering a single product that can deliver the performance and scalability offered by today’s army of me-too clustering solutions. By falling back on clustering, storage and server vendors alike are admitting to themselves and to their customers that their architecture is flawed, and that one of their products alone cannot come close to solving their unique needs.
But that's not what you wanted to hear and it's too detailed... Simply put, Xsan is a great tool for customers who already have Xserves with XRAID. I hope Apple keeps working hard to provide solutions their customers are asking for - and surprising us with things we want that we don't know we need yet.
- louismg
Apple: iTunes will debut in Europe this year
http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5193440.html
By Reuters
Apple Computer said Friday it was sticking to a plan to launch a European version of its iTunes Music Store on the Internet this year, saying it would not rush it out until it is perfect.
In the United States, the iTunes Music Store has been up and running for a year, and it has helped boost sales of the iPod, Apple's portable music player.
Apple sold 807,000 iPods in the January-to-March quarter, an increase of more than nine times compared with the same period a year earlier. That number also exceeds the total number of computers Apple sold.
"When we launch in Europe, we want to do it well. There can be no compromise on the ease of use, the depth of the catalog or the responsiveness (of the Web site)," Apple's European chief, Pascal Cagni, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
He added that a delay of a few months would be acceptable because Apple feels the store will be an important outlet for many years.
"This is going to be so important for the future that a few months' delay is not essential,'' he said.
"But it will come. Absolutely,'' he added, when asked if he was sticking to the launch target year of 2004.
With more than 50 million songs having been purchased on its site, the iTunes store has become the top music site in the United States. It sells music mostly at a standard price of 99 cents per song and gives consumers the right to copy their songs to other devices and burn them on CDs.
In Europe, Apple has been beaten to the market by Microsoft's MSN Music Club and others, while Sony has announced a June launch for its Connect music store in Europe. OD2, which licenses its download service to many European music sites, said that 1 million songs were sold in the first quarter.
Unlike iTunes, most rival sites do not have a uniform pricing structure and often require the purchase of vouchers.
Cagni said it was more complicated to align music publishers in Europe than in the United States.
"There are massive differences in price--it can vary with a factor of two, and the taxes in countries are different,'' he said, criticizing the major publishing houses that have done a lot of work to digitize their music portfolios but little to negotiate rights with artists, producers and editors.
Despite the absence of a music store, Apple Europe saw sales of iPods, which start at 349 euros in Europe and $299 in the United States, multiply at almost the same rate as the global average, Cagni said.
In Europe, British consumers in particular were snapping the device up. Another boost is expected in July, when the iPod Mini is to be introduced in Europe. "That's one of the big growth opportunities. It offers a new price range, which is important in Europe, where consumers are price sensitive," he said.
The European introduction of iPod Mini, which is smaller, lighter and comes in different colors, was delayed by three months because Apple feared it would not be able to meet demand after its runaway success in the United States.
The iPod works with both Apple's own computers and with computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system.
iPod, iBook Sales Seen Lifting Apple Q2
04.13.04, 11:57 AM ET
<http://www.forbes.com/markets/2004/04/13/0413automarketscan06.html>
Morgan Stanley increased estimates for Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ), citing better-than-expected sell-through in the fiscal second quarter (ended March) of iPods, Panther OS and iBooks. The research firm raised expectations for the quarter to earnings of 10 cents per share on revenue of $1.82 billion, compared with an earlier estimate for earnings of 9 cents per share on revenue of $1.81 billion. Morgan Stanley raised fiscal 2004 estimates to earnings of 49 cents per share on revenue of $7.69 billion, compared with an earlier estimate for earnings of 45 cents on revenue of $.750 billion. Morgan Stanley said, "Our only concern lies with the possibility of disappointing G5 sales in the period." The firm lowered its second-quarter G5 unit forecast to 181,000 units from 212,000 units. For the remainder of fiscal 2004, Morgan Stanley increased its iPod unit estimates to 3.7 million from 2.8 million. Elsewhere in the sector, the firm said PC demand was not as soft as some expected for the March calendar quarter and noted that pricing activity in both printers and PCs "was below what we've seen in recent quarters." That trend is most likely to benefit Lexmark International (nyse: LXK - news - people ) and Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ), Morgan Stanley said. Lexmark and Gateway (nyse: GTW - news - people ) are most likely to see first-quarter revenue and/or second-quarter guidance upside, the firm said. IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) is also a strong candidate for upside given recent strength in enterprise hardware sales, Morgan Stanley said.
Watch for Apple to Unveil an XSAN
Worth noting was the recent trademark of the term "XSAN" by Apple, no doubt referring to an extension of their XServe/XRAID series to that incorporating a Storage Area Network, or SAN.
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=n6a91q.3.1
The price per megabyte of Apple's XServe/XRAID solutions is not to be laughed at - considering that even the least-expensive offerings from players like NetApp and EMC is in the 2-3 cents per MB range for ATA devices, while Apple is offering solutions at fractions of a penny per MB, for those who aren't seeking performance or the array of services offered from the more-established enterprise players.
I have bumped into Apple at a number of industry events like Bio-IT World and Siggraph, and know they are finding quite a few spots for success. Should be interesting to see how this plays out.
- louismg
Regarding Federal Accounts and Security
It is not uncommon for federal government accounts to request that their purchases not be announced, or even mentioned, to the press or to other customers.
As somebody who works in marketing and PR, and manages a customer database that lists customers, and their application for our equipment, it is not unheard of for the application to be listed as "top secret", and for the customer to specifically request that their logo not be used on customer slides for presentations, on the corporate Web site, or even that it could be mentioned they have purchased our equipment.
Some of our biggest, and likely, the industry's biggest, sales have gone unreported specifically because the customer could not be referenced, or named, which does most journalists no good - if they just have to take your word for it.
It is not outside the realms of possibility that this would be the case for Apple as well.
- louismg
Apple Computer loses bid to hear Beatles case in US
Tuesday April 6, 12:04 pm ET
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/040406/media_music_apple_1.html
LONDON, April 6 (Reuters) - Apple Computer Inc. (NasdaqNM:AAPL - News) on Tuesday lost a High Court bid to have its legal case brought by the management company for legendary Fab Four rockers, the Beatles, moved from Britain to the United States.
The California computer maker has been embroiled in a trademark dispute since September with the similarly named London-based Apple Corps., the company formed in 1968 to manage the band's business interests and act as its music label.
Apple Corps. took the computer maker to court, accusing Apple Computer of violating a 1991 agreement specifying that it could use the Apple trademark for computer products only.
The Beatles management said Apple Computer broke the agreement when it used the fruity logo and trademark to promote its iTunes online music store, the most popular Internet download service in the world.
A London High Court judge on Tuesday struck down Apple's request to have the case heard by California courts. The computer maker argued the U.S. was the proper place for the hearing as this was where the original agreement between the two companies was struck.
Launched a year ago, iTunes has given hope to weary music executives looking for an industry-backed online music store capable of derailing free file-sharing networks such as WinMX and Kazaa.
Re: SUNW Trading
Herb, I sold all my SUNW this morning, up more than 20% in 9 days. I don't see SUNW's core business getting better, but I'll take the trading spike.
- louismg
Sun settles with Microsoft, announces 3,300 job cuts
<http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/040402/na_fin_com_us_sun_microsystems_4.html>
Friday April 2, 9:38 am ET
By May Wong, AP Technology Writer
SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- Struggling server maker Sun Microsystems Inc. reached a sweeping, $1.6 billion settlement with Microsoft Corp. and said it plans to cooperate with its longtime nemesis, a company it had branded an unrepentant monopolist.
The surprise agreement was accompanied by an announcement by Sun that it is cutting 3,300 jobs and that its net loss for the fiscal third quarter will be wider than expected. The cuts represent 9 percent of its total work force of more than 35,000.
The "broad cooperating agreement" with Microsoft ends Sun's $1 billion private antitrust suit against the Redmond, Washington-based software giant. Sun's complaints also sparked the investigation that led to the European Union's recent record fine against Microsoft.
"This agreement launches a new relationship between Sun and Microsoft -- a significant step forward that allows for cooperation while preserving customer choice," said Scott McNealy, Sun's chief executive.
As part of the deal, Microsoft will pay Sun $700 million to resolve the antitrust case, which was scheduled to go to trial in January 2006, and $900 million to resolve patent issues. Sun and Microsoft also will pay royalties for each others' technologies.
"Our companies will continue to compete hard, but this agreement creates a new basis for cooperation that will benefit the customers of both companies," said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive officer.
Sun, once a shining star of Silicon Valley, also said it expects revenue for the quarter ended March 28 to be approximately $2.65 billion. Net loss will be between $750 million and $810 million, or 23 cents to 25 cents per share.
Analysts polled by Thomson First Call were projecting a loss of 3 cents a share on revenue of $2.85 billion.
Hour-Long DJ Sets Now Available on iTunes
Here's one way to increase iTunes revenue... 2 songs, 2 and a half hours, $25.
From ATB's album, "DJ - In the Mix"
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?selectedItemId=5356955&playListI...
and
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?selectedItemId=5356913&playListI...
I admit to buying it... and I know many like me who would spend hundreds on DJ sets just like this.
Go AAPL!
- louismg
Time Warner and Microsoft Holding AOL Acquisition Talks
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/040319/tech_aol_microsoft_1.html
Time Warner, Microsoft have held AOL talks-report
Friday March 19, 9:38 am ET
NEW YORK, March 19 (Reuters) - Media conglomerate Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX - News) has held talks in recent months with software maker Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - News), about selling its America Online unit, the New York Post reported on Friday.
Time Warner lawyers have begun studying potential antitrust issues stemming from a possible Microsoft acquisition of AOL, and so far they have found few roadblocks to a deal, the newspaper said, citing unidentified sources familiar with the matter.
Time Warner spokesman Ed Adler was not immediately available for comment on Friday. He was quoted by the newspaper as saying "such speculation is silly and pointless."
Microsoft also was not immediately available for comment.
Rumor: Apple WebPad/PDA
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=39471
8.5x4.25x.95 (Not accurate)
Mac OS X
G4
2 firewire
1 usb
bluetooth
fullsize keyboard
40-60-80? gb hard disk
802.11g?
CDMA, GPRS, compatible celluar device (known to work with cingular)
stylus
inkwell (advanced version)
assistant (learns from everything you do)
on the go home directory and syncing with your desktop
telephony
headphone out
speaker/dictation button on front
OS X apps and tweaks to enchance experience...
Before August 1st.
Re: Pixar and Mac OS X
Tom, just for sake's sake, it's worth pointing out that I announced Pixar moving to Mac OS X (as well as the Mac OS X version of Renderman) in July of 2003...
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=1264711
But enough about that. Should I also say that I sold all my AAPL on Monday at 26.50, and am a buck and a half out of the top, proving I really don't know everything?
- louismg
Adding to the iPod Mini craze
Doing my part to accelerate AAPL's stock rally, I bought a blue iPod mini, with armband and FM tuner at the Valley Fair retail store yesterday night, for my mother, who needed to upgrade from her portable CD player she uses when walking in the mornings.
Of course, the jump in AAPL yesterday alone paid for it...
Go AAPL!
- louismg
Microsoft Behind SCO Anti-Linux Campaign to $100 Million
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween10.html
iPod vs. Mac
Me: Mac, then Mac, then Mac, then Mac, then iPod, then Mac, then iPod, then Mac.
Person 2: iPod for Windows (later reprogrammed), then Mac, then 2nd Mac for home, then 2nd Mac laptop.
Person 3: Mac, then iPod
Person 4: Mac, then iPod, then iPod for wife
Person 5: Mac, then iPod
Others I am not as familiar with, but can comment on the above.
- louismg
iPod Minis - Almost Sold Out (and none in Cupertino)
Two new Apple converts from work and I were just at the Cupertino Apple Store on the Apple campus, and there were no iPod Minis available at all - barring the two on display (not for sale). An employee ushered us off to a "retail store" - which we thought we were at - to get the new Minis, and were told they had them in supply.
A short jaunt over to Valley Fair later, we learned that they too were sold out of EVERY iPod Mini color, with the exception of silver. One of my colleagues bought a silver iPod Mini for his wife, while the other learned he would have to be put on a waiting list for a blue iPod Mini, and if reserved in the morning of a business day, he would have the full business day to pick it up.
The other colleague, buying a 4 Gig Silver Mini for his wife, actually purchased a 40 Gig iPod for himself this weekend, and has been ripping CDs all week. Our corporate network now has quite a few shared iTunes playlists to choose from...
One thing to note: EVERY Macintosh convert here has ALSO bought an iPod (or two), without exception.
- louismg
Mini iPods and More Business Macs
My wife and I saw some of the mini iPods today at the local Apple Store in one of the busiest malls in the area, and they look and feel great - easy as anything to an old iPod user, and the store floor was pretty busy, even at 7 p.m. on a Saturday night.
Amusingly, I could swear I saw at least 5-8 random people in the mall with the trademark white earbuds just boppin' to their own iPods as they walked through.
In other news, the Mac onslaught at the office continues. Our CTO upgraded from his 1-year-old TiBook to a new Aluminum PowerBook, while getting another for a new hire.
The beauty is more than two new Apple machines. The "old" TiBook has been donated to our Director of IT "for supporting the Mac users".
Now one of the most Wintel-focused guys in our business is quickly crumbling to the Mac pressure, and is using the Mac base in the company to test some of the first IT projects before rolling out to the Wintelites. The Sr. Management team is 33% Mac, and our entire professional services and sales engineering teams have bought their own Mac laptops as well, making this organic growth an eventuality.
Fun, fun, fun.
- louismg