Apple Releases Sales Figures: Mac Sales Grow 17%

I would not trust anyone who said there is no such thing a recession proof company because, Apple just released their sales figures and its much better than expected. Last quarter, Apple sold more iPhones & iMacs then ever before: 3.05 million Macs and 7.4 million iPhones. But, this quarter was not a perfect one for apple. The failing iPod continued the falling sales trend. This is most likely because smart phones, particularly the iPhone, provide all the things the doomed iPod have to offer.

If you are wondering how much profit Apple has made the quarter here it is: $9.87 billion. That is the second largest revenue Apple has made, next to last Christmas season.

Mac sales grew over 17% which is a huge leap considering the mere 2% of growth the industry totaled overall. Laptops were 74% of all Macs sold. Please take not that the the 17% growth is not market share. Apple still holds only about 9% of the desktop market share. Half of the Macs sold are still sold to first time Mac buyers.

Here are the somewhat disappointing iPod sale figures. 10.2 million iPods were sold which is down from the 11 million units sold last year (down 8%). Here is the crazy thing; iPod touch sales grew 100%! Surprisingly 50% of iPod bought were going to first time buyers. The iPod still has 70% of the market share. Sorry Zune HD.

Most Profitable Quarter Ever; Record Mac and iPhone Sales

CUPERTINO, Calif. Oct. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2009 fourth quarter ended September 26, 2009. The Company posted revenue of $9.87 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.67 billion, or $1.82 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $7.9 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.14 billion, or $1.26 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 36.6 percent, up from 34.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 46 percent of the quarter's revenue.

In accordance with the subscription accounting treatment required by GAAP, the Company recognizes revenue and cost of goods sold for iPhone™ and Apple TV® over their estimated economic lives. Adjusting GAAP sales and product costs to eliminate the impact of subscription accounting, the corresponding non-GAAP measures* for the quarter are $12.25 billion of "Adjusted Sales" and $2.85 billion of "Adjusted Net Income."

Apple sold 3.05 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a 17 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 10.2 million iPods during the quarter, representing an eight percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones in the quarter, representing seven percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.

"We are thrilled to have sold more Macs and iPhones than in any previous quarter," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We've got a very strong lineup for the holiday season and some really great new products in the pipeline for 2010."

"We are delighted with our September quarter and fiscal 2009 results," said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO. "For the full year, we grew revenue by 12 percent and net income by 18 percent in extraordinarily challenging times. Looking ahead to the first fiscal quarter of 2010, we expect revenue in the range of about $11.3 billion to $11.6 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share in the range of about $1.70 to $1.78."

Apple will provide live streaming of its Q4 2009 financial results conference call utilizing QuickTime®, Apple's standards-based technology for live and on-demand audio and video streaming. The live webcast will begin at 2:00 p.m. PDT on October 19, 2009 at www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq409/ and will also be available for replay for approximately two weeks thereafter.

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Snow Leopard Malware Blocker Only Blocks two Trojans

Earlier this week Apple announced that Mac OSX Snow Leopard would come with a malware blocker, which prompted overwhelming excitement. Lets just say that the malware blocker was less than underwhelming. It only blocks two Trojans.

The two Trojans it protects your Mac from are OSX.RSPlug and OSX.Iservice. Even worse, it only scans for the Trojans in a few applications. Intego (an OSX security company) found that the malware blocker is half baked in several ways:

Apple's anti-malware function only scans files downloaded with a handful of applications (Safari, Mail, iChat, Firefox, Entourage, and a few other web browsers) — therefore the disturbingly modest signatures base would be undermined if the user were to download the malware from a BitTorrent application

Apple's anti-malware function currently only scans for two Trojan horses, as of the initial release of Snow Leopard — relying on such a modest set of signatures for malware variants of known OS X families, clearly indicates the premature release of the feature

Apple's anti-malware function receives occasional updates via Apple's Software Update — in respect to malware, even Mac OS X malware, every modified variant of a known malware family enjoys a decent life cycle until it gets detected through malware signatures. In its current form the reliance on occasional Apple Software Updates compared to regular/scheduled independent signatures update, clearly increases the life cycle of a known piece of malware.

I personally believe that the anti malware feature provides a false sense of security. Apple may make it better in the future, but that seems unlikely. Windows Defender was better than this.

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Two New Attacks for OSX Surface

Security experts have discovered two new attacks targeting Mac users, a new version of a worm and a Trojan hidden inside a porn site (which I will not name or go to).

On Tuesday Paretologic warned about a porn site downloading malware that targets both Windows and OSX. Mac users get redirected to pagemac.php that downloads a QuickTime.dmg file.

"As we've demonstrated before, and as we'll no doubt explain again, the Mac malware threat is real,"writes Sophos security researcher Graham CluleyHackers are deliberately planting malicious code on Web sites, and using social engineering tricks to fool you into installing it onto your computer."

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Apple Bashes Windows 7, While Talking Snow Leopard

While Microsoft tries to reinvent Windows with their next operating system, Windows 7 Apple has characterised it as “the same old Windows”.

In a keynote speech at the Worldwide Developer Conference Apples Bertrand Serlet said that Windows 7 contained the same complexities of previous versions of Windows.

“Fundamentally it is just another Windows Vista” – Bertrand Serlet

Serlet tried to draw a contrast between Windows and what Apple is doing with Snow Leopard, the next version of its own operating system. "We've come at it from such a different place."

Apples goal with Snow Leopard is to make a “better Leopard”

There are similarities between what Apple's and Microsoft's efforts. Among the new features in Snow Leopard is a feature that adds the Expose window--previewing feature to the Dock--not unlike the Aero Peek feature that Windows 7 has as part of its new task bar.

In all fairness Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are very different Operating Systems.

Windows 7 is largely focused on improving the look, perception and core of the Vista engine, while Snow Leopard is more focused on improving the core.

Apple is also trying to improve Windows compatibility by adding Microsoft Exchange support in Snow Leopard. According to Apple all the user needs to type their e-mail address and password and Snow Leopard will auto detect the exchange server.

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Install OSX 10.5 (Leopard) on a PC

Installing Mac OSX on a PC is not allowed but it can be done. While having OSX on a PC can be useful, it is illegal therefore I am required to put a legal disclaimer.

INSTALLING APPLE’S MAC OSX ON A PC IS ILLIGAL AND BREAKES THE OSX EULA. WE HIGHLEY RECCOMEND AGENST INSTALLING OSX ON A PC. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMIGES CAUSED TO YOUR PC AND WE CANNOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY LEGAL ACTIONS TAKEN.

1. Get an Apple Leopard disk.

• You can get it from a friend or the apple store or website, Ebay might sell them.

2. Insert it into your disk drive, it'll soon be mounted on your desktop (It'll take longer to mount then a regular disk because of the amount of data).

3. The disk should be on your desktop now open up the disk and open the installer, you'll need to enter an administrator name and password.

4. It'll ask you to restart, get a cup of coffee, your computer will take longer to boot up this time.

5. Once it's booted up you'll have the installer popup with the new Leopard menu bar.

6. Choose your language

7. Soon you'll come up to a screen that actually asks you to install it (finally), first you should verify your consistency, have some food.

8. Once your disk is done being checked you'll have the installation part, the approximate times is about two hours and thirty minutes or so for processors 1 GHz or up, the approximate install time for computers 867 MHz to 1 GHz is about 3 hours, go out to eat or something, go work on your secondary computer.

9. Finally, when your done installing it you'll have your new system, Leopard!

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Status of Mac vs. PC battle: PC is Winning

Apple may have one of the most interesting and longest running ad campaigns in history, but it seems like Microsoft’s young Laptop Hunters ads are winning according to Brand Index.

The Laptop Hunter ads show regular people trying to find the perfect laptop within a certain price point and naturally the Laptop they choose is a PC. 

Based on daily interviews of 5,000 people, BrandIndex found the age group gave Apple its highest rating in late winter, when it notched a value score of 70 on a scale of -100 to 100 (a score of zero means that people are giving equal amounts of positive and negative feedback about a brand). But its score began to fall shortly after and, despite brief rallies, hovers around 12.4 today.

"It would be very unusual for Microsoft's score to be increasing this much and Apple's to be decreasing without some sort of event driving that, like a major campaign that's particularly successful," said Mr. Marzilli.

Microsoft gave credit the strong PC market, despite the recession, to the great success of the ad campaign. Microsoft said there was a 10% preference of Windows due to the ad campaign.

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Vista/7 More Secure than OSX and Linux

Security is always a highlycontended subject, and last week Microsoft claimed that Windows Vista and Windows  7 is the world’s most secure OS, beating both Linux and Mac OS X.

Here’s what Microsoft’s chief operating officer Kevin Turner had said

 

Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It’s the safest and most secure OS on the planet today. Everything that we’ve learned in Vista will be leveraged in Windows 7, but certainly when we broke a lot of the compatibility issues to lock down user account controls, to lock down the ability to manipulate states and all the things, that was a very painful process for us to grow through, but we had to do it. And the reason that Windows 7 will be successful is because of the pain we took on Vista. Because from a compatibility standpoint, if it works on Vista, it will work on Windows 7. If it doesn’t work on Vista, it won’t work on Windows 7.

 

The My OS is better then yours is pointless and benefits nobody.

As a Windows user I can’t help but believe that Windows is more secure than any other OS but the facts actually prove that Windows is really more secure than any other OS. Intact almost all tests agree with Kevin Turner and I. The only reason Windows has so many viruses is because most people use Windows, therefore virus makers can make much more money off infected PC’s. If you don’t agree here is a analogy I made:

If you had the choice to rob a house with only $1 in it with all the doors unlocked, or the choice of a house with a $1,000,000 in it with tight security which would you choose. The average guy with common sense would pick the second one. Windows would be the house with $1,000,000 and OSX & Linux would be the first choice.

Tripp Zao

April 23 2009

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Microsoft Punches Apple’s ads back with Laptop Hunters

Microsoft latest attack ad’s agents apple are called Laptop Hunters. These 3 ads feature 4 people hunting for a laptop below a certain price. Of course

they all complain about the prices of Mac’s. Most people say that this ad campaign actually got them to switch back to Windows; it turned out that Microsoft can get something right.

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CNBC has Lost it's Mind

Regular, non computer geeks, are very confused enough about buying a Mac or PC so CNBC decided to clear things up by breaking the true cost of Mac and PC ownership. Wait, I did not know that Mac’s had battery that lasted all day.

According to CNBC Silicon Valley Bureau Chief (a ridiculous title) PC’s need many more things to perform as well as Mac’s such as:

 

Product:	Price:	The Truth:
Norton Anti-Virus	$50 Year	I got Norton Internet Security for $30 from Canada Computers.All OS’S need Anti-Virus software.
Multimedia Software	$80-$104	What the hell is he talking about, Windows Media Center has all the multimedia you need.
Photoshop	$140	Only professional photo editors need it. The average user only Needs Photo Gallery.
Video Editing	$100	Comes with Windows
Music Software	$100	Why would you need music software. Windows Media Player has all you need.
Geek Squad Visit	$129	Most Mac’s and PC’s will need to visit Geek Squad

He also said Mac’s get 6x the battery life (not true) faster processors (not true) and higher screen resolutions (not true).

Last time I checked you could get very decent anti-virus software for free, Mac’s don’t come with Photoshop or endless battery, and iTunes is free and OSX and Windows. There are very decent free photo editing software on Windows  like Google’s Picasa and is just as good or better than iPhoto. It’s finny how he forgot to mention how Windows Live is 100% free and Apple’s Mobile Me (the Windows Live equivalent) charges $100 a year.

There are reasons not to get a PC like there are valid reasons not to get a Mac. But this guy is on a news program as a reporter and the public will believe most things the news tells them, if he’s going to go on TV and tell people why Mac’s are better than PC’s go ahead, but he should know what he’s talking about. I hope this guy gets fired and has to wash is mouth out with soap. :)

Mac’s have a battery that last all day, C’mon guy!!

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