Ivory Tower
April was a busy month for Apple!
by Ted Bade
Wow, this has been a busy month, Apple announced another exceptional financial quarter; two easy- to-use solutions arrived for running Windows on an Intel Mac (and one was from Apple!) and iPods and the iTMS still managed to dominate the music scene.
Windows on Mac - I won’t go into a lot of detail on this (but do see my article on the subject, later in this issue), but it is exciting. In my opinion, this option gives a user the ability to run those one or two special apps that somehow never make it to the Macintosh. Both solutions are better then buying additional hardware or dealing with the speed hits of emulation.
I feel that this option being available might get many fence-sitters to finally buy the Mac they really want! You know the ones I mean, those people who would like to buy a Mac but have one or two Windows applications they “just have to use” and so they don’t. Now you can tell them, buy a Mac, and install Windows for that application. But run in the safe, secure, and easy to use Mac OS environment the rest of the time!
The solutions really work. As I am writing this, my Mac Mini is transferring a couple of TV shows from my Tivo that I really want to save to DVD. When the file is transferred, I will use a DVD burning software package for Windows to burn a DVD. I have done this already and it works! I have been storing one of these shows for well over a year waiting for the Tivo people to release a Mac OS version to let me do this. I decided to wait no more and set up a Dual Core Mac Mini to do this for me.
One might also wonder what is the fate of emulation software packages like VirtualPC. Microsoft purchased this package from its creator a couple of years ago and at that time people were afraid of how Microsoft might affect the software. But now the issue is moot. Why choose emulation if you can run directly in hardware? However, an article in Macworld indicates that Microsoft hasn’t yet decided on the fate of VirtualPC; http://news.yahoo.com/s/macworld/20060407/tc_macworld/vpc20060407
Microsoft might just create their own virtualization solution and package it with a copy of Windows and a better price then you could buy a similar package. For instance, Parallels Mac OS Workstation will cost $50 USD when released, add to that cost $200 for XP and the cost of running Windows on your Intel Mac is significant. Microsoft sells VirtualPC with a version of XP for $150 as a stand-alone package. If they carried this price model to a virtualization package, they could be a very competitive solution.
Another aspect of this feature is that it just might put Apple in direct competition with other PC vendors. Think about it. Apple makes terrific computers. They use top of the line hardware and are known for their lack of problems, not to mention Apple’s customer service is always rated very high by its users.
Up until the Intel Macs, if you bought an Apple, you could only use Mac OS X. Now, you could buy a Mac and use it solely for Windows. Personally, I wouldn’t want to do that, but there are people who need to use a lot of Windows-based software, but would like to run a few Mac Apps as well. It’s an interesting concept.
Oh Baloney, you just want more money - Apparently Mac OS users have not been buying much in the way of anti-virus software. Could it be because they don’t see a need for software to remove something that doesn't exist?
Recently an executive of a security company spoke about how Mac users pose a threat to Windows users. How is this you ask? By being immune to these types of problems, they don’t keep anti-virus software on their computers and so they pass along malicious software to their PC pals. I guess that makes us immune carriers; http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/3864/0
What I really think is happening here is that the anti-virus software companies want to expand sales into the Mac market. While the information about this is true, I don’t think Mac OS X users should run out and get anti-virus software to help protect their friends. I think they should tell their friends to complain to their software giants and get them to resolve the malicious software issue. Let them pay the Windows tax, the cost of buying and updating their virus software. They, not you the dedicated Mac user, choose to run Windows. ;-)
Apple had a good second quarter financially - Once again they beat the market predictions. In a nutshell, Apple posted revenue of $4.36 billion and a net quarterly profit of $410 million,. Compare this to the same quarter a year ago. These results compare to revenue of $3.24 billion and a net profit of $290 million. Apple shipped 1,112,000 Macs computers and 8,526,000 iPods, representing 4 percent growth in Macs and 61 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.
While this is all good news, that was truly a meager increase in Mac sales. Come on people, get out there and buy a few Macs!
Speaking about iPods - We know that Apple holds the majority of the digital Music player market. I found an article on the Mac News Network site; http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/04/20/apples.music.business/ that pointed out that Apple’s share of the digital player market rose to 78% of the market (up from 71% previously), and their share of legal music downloads rose to 87%! (This information was garnered from the financial conference call Apple held.)
Also according to this article, Apple indicated they have expanded their content to include 2.9M music tracks, 60K podcasts, 9K music videos, and 70 television shows. Quite a lot of content!
According to another article there http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/04/25/ipod.gaining.market.share/, the iPod is flourishing on lists for portable MP3 players at Amazon.com as it holds all ten spots in the top 10! I guess the iPod is popular.
So, Apple, what is next?
