https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1I6-wv0p8k
Spotify has released a major update to its iPhone app, bringing a new dark look and feel. The new layout relies heavily on the contextual blurring and geometric motifs of iOS 7.
Noting that the Mac’s share of the PC market has risen almost continuously over the past decade (with just a brief dip in 2012) despite costing an average of $700 more than competitor machines, Needham’s Charlie Wolf is quoted by Fortune as saying that it “seems to defy the laws of economics.”
The only explanation that we see is the now-mythical halo effect. Beginning with the iPod in the middle of the past decade and then extending to the iPhone and iPad, a meaningful number of Windows users who bought these products seem to have switched from a PC to a Mac […]
What should be underscored is how unique the Mac phenomenon is […] we view the Mac’s success as the rare instance where sales increased in the face of rising prices.
The halo effect of the brand undoubtedly plays a part, but he seems to have missed the rather obvious point that OS X is a rather better operating system than Windows, and the slickness of the ecosystem makes a Mac an obvious choice for anyone who already owns an iOS device …
A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, via Fortune, sheds some light on customer behaviour of how quickly people get their iPad, iPhone or Macs upgraded or replaced. For instance, iPhones have approximate lifespans of two years, tied closely to when people’s contracts end. If the phone is in good condition, rather unsurprisingly, most people replace their phones alongside their new contract. Macs stay around for up to four years before being swapped out for newer equipment. The report argues that iPad life cycles more closely resemble Macs than iPhones.
However, in the case of loss or damage, people are much more compelled to replace their iPhones than Macs or iPads. Eighty percent of people replace iPhones within just two days. For Macs and iPads, this stretches out a week or even more. Over a quarter of buyers surveyed said they would replace an iPad immediately compared to approximately 37% for iPhones.
[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/70141303 width=”704″ height=”420″]
Via TwinCities.com, the first ever Apple authorized reseller is going to end business after over 36 years of trading. Located in Minneapolis, Team Electronics (which later changed its name to FirstTech) was shipped Apple’s first batch of computers in the late 1970’s. It has sold Apple devices for more than three decades, celebrating its 35th anniversary in 2012.However, on March 29th, the shop will close due to shrinking margins.
From 9to5Toys.com:
The Apple Store just got filled with refurbished iPad Airs in a few varieties starting at $419 for 16GB and $509 for 32GB in both Space Grey or White. That’s $80/$90 off the new price and the lowest price we’ve seen for iPad Airs with Apple’s 1 year AppleCare warranty (we saw them new for $430 last week). Apple certified refurbished products look and act like new, come with all manuals and accessories, a new outer shell batter and come in a new white box.
Walmart still has refurbished iPad Airs for $399 but with a more dubious 90-day non-Apple warranty. Meanwhile, if you are after new iPad Airs, Staples currently has them for $50 off across the board.
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4K display running at “Retina” resolution on 10.9.3
Earlier today, Apple provided developers with the first beta for the upcoming release of OS X Mavericks version 10.9.3. Apple did not disclose any new features coming in 10.9.3, but we have discovered that the update includes notable enhancements for users with Macs connected to 4K-resolution monitors. With 10.9.3, Mac users can now natively set their 4K monitors to run the Mac operating system at a pixel-doubled “Retina” resolution.
The new settings, which appear nearly identical to the settings on a standard Retina MacBook Pro display, can be seen here on a 10.9.3 Mac connected to a 4K monitor:
Image: deskology.com
I have a number of friends who can’t understand why I pay what they refer to as ‘the Apple tax’: the premium paid for Apple products over alternatives that offer much the same functionality.
I can argue about the functionality, of course. The usability, stability and (usually!) security of OS X are all things worth paying for in my view, but I’m not ashamed to admit that aesthetics also matter to me. When I’m going to spend 8+ hours in front of a computer, I’d rather I was looking at something sleek and beautiful rather than something plastic, ugly and a chore to use and understand.
I feel the same way about the other technology on my desk and in my office, but it isn’t always easy to find kit that works well and looks the part too. I can’t help thinking there’s a lot of office technology that could use the Jony Ive touch …
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Here’s the reason, courtesy of a concept drawing from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where the graphical user interface was invented, and where Steve Jobs was introduced to the concept that was to lead to the Macintosh. 8BitFuture writes:
When the graphical user interface was later developed by Xerox, however, the team found that the vertical pointer was almost impossible to see due to the low resolution displays in use at the time.
Rather than make the pointer larger, the decision was made to turn it 45 degrees, making it easy to see. Despite the high resolution displays we have today, the concept has managed to stick for 33 years.
Some sums done by ComputerWorld show that Mac users are four times more likely to upgrade to the latest available version of the operating system than Windows users.
Microsoft has convinced just 11.6 percent of Windows users who acquired their system since 2001 and still actively use it to go online to migrate to the current edition of its operating system […]
Apple’s convinced 41.6 percent of Mac users who acquired their system since 2001 and still actively use them online to adopt the current edition of the OS.
A large part of it is cost, of course: Mavericks was a free upgrade, and previous upgrades have been priced far more competitively than Windows.
But Apple has also offered a simpler upgrade path, adding features rather than making major changes to the core user-interface. OS X also operates more efficiently, allowing Mavericks to run well on far older hardware than is the case for Windows 8.
If you’re finding that your Mac fans are running a lot more than they used to, you might want to check out whether a couple of Spotlight processes are consuming more than their fair share of CPU cycles.
Ever since the latest Mavericks update, I found that my MacBook Pro seemed to be running hot a lot of the time, with fans ramping up to high levels to cool it. Checking Activity Monitor didn’t seem to be shedding much light on things at first glance. The only two processes using an unusual amount of CPU were mds and mds_stores. These are two processes used by Spotlight when indexing, so I didn’t think too much of it – Spotlight has to do its indexing sometime, right?
But several checks later, these two processes seemed to be helping themselves to significant chunks of CPU on a regular basis, at which point I did some Googling.
I started by disabling Spotlight altogether to confirm that it was the culprit. To do this, I went into Terminal and entered:
sudo mdutil -a -i off
The fans spooled down and all was back to normal. Spotlight was indeed the culprit.
I briefly considered leaving Spotlight off until the next OS X update, but that proved too much of a pain. I keep my most-used apps in the dock, but everything else I habitually launch from Spotlight. CMD-space plus the first letter or two of the app is just too convenient to give up. So I did some more Googling – after switching Spotlight back on with:
sudo mdutil -a -i on
The first tip I found was here, where it suggested deleting the Spotlight database and forcing it to re-index. You can do this in Terminal again:
sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/*
Top tip: set this going overnight, as the re-indexing takes a while.
This helped quite a bit, but the mds process still seemed a little greedy. More Googling led me to a suggestion to remove from Spotlight’s indexing any directories with frequently-changing content, especially those used for online backup. You can do this by going into System Preferences, clicking the Privacy tab and then drag-and-dropping onto it any directories you don’t want it to index.
I added my CrashPlan, MobileSync and Dropbox folders – three specific suggestions I’d found – and then for good measure added some others with frequently-changing content.
This did the trick: my fans stayed on low, and Activity Monitor showed the mds processes consuming only tiny amounts of CPU.
I’m not sure how general an issue this – hence making this an aside – but if you’re finding your Mac running hot, it may be worth checking out.
Rita Lane, Apple’s vice president of operations for the iPad, Mac desktops, and Mac accessories, has retired from the company, according to her public LinkedIn profile. As vice president of operations, Lane was in charge of the supply chain and manufacturing for iPads, computers like the iMac, and Apple’s Mac accessories.
Due to her position, Lane was likely instrumental in the iPad’s rapid growth as a product and emergence in society over the past few years, making the departure a significant loss for Apple. However, the company likely has other experienced operations managers who could fill Lane’s role. Her exact successor is unknown…
9to5Mac originally documented the supply issues with the new Mac Pro in December, but even today availability does not appear to have improved. In fact, it seems to be getting worse. Apple’s European, Chinese and Australian online stores (including the UK) are now reporting ‘April’ dispatch estimates.
Former WSJ Apple reporter/scoopster Yukari Iwatani Kane is coming out with a new book called Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs ($12.74 Amazon/$14.99 iBookstore).
We’re not sure how the book reads quite yet but this excerpt of her New Yorker piece via Fortune, doesn’t take on a very optimistic tone for the company where she once had some solid sources:
When Jobs was ousted in 1985, the impact of his absence on Apple’s business was not immediately obvious. After a slow start, Macintosh sales began rising. Two years after Jobs left, Apple’s annual sales had almost doubled compared to three years earlier, and its gross profit margin was an astonishing fifty-one per cent. Outside appearances suggested that Apple hadn’t missed a beat.
Inside Apple, employees knew differently. Something had changed. “I was let down when Steve left,” Steve Scheier, a marketing manager at Apple from 1982 to 1991, recalled. “The middle managers, the directors, and the vice presidents kept the spirit alive for a long time without his infusion, but eventually you start hiring people you shouldn’t hire. You start making mistakes you shouldn’t have made.” Scheier told me that he eventually grew tired and left. The company had “become more of a business and less of a crusade.”
So what about now? Apple’s supporters point to the company’s billions of dollars in quarterly profit and its tens of billions in revenue as proof that it continues to thrive. But Apple’s employees again know differently, despite the executive team’s best efforts to preserve Jobs’s legacy. People who shouldn’t be hired are being hired (like Apple’s former retail chief, John Browett, who tried to incorporate big-box-retailer sensibilities into Apple’s refined store experience). People who shouldn’t leave are leaving, or, in the case of the mobile-software executive Scott Forstall, being fired.
Mistakes, in turn, are being made: Apple Maps was a fiasco, and ads, like the company’s short-lived Genius ads and last summer’s self-absorbed manifesto ad, have been mediocre. Apple’s latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 7, looks pretty but is full of bugs and flaws. As for innovation, the last time Apple created something that was truly great was the original iPad, when Jobs was still alive. Although the company’s C.E.O., Tim Cook, insists otherwise, Apple seems more eager to talk about the past than about the future. Even when it refers to the future, it is more intent on showing consumers how it hasn’t changed rather than how it is evolving. The thirtieth anniversary of the Macintosh—and the “1984” ad—is not just commemorative. It is a reminder of what Apple has stopped being.
It is tough to replace the legend, but hopefully this is just the pessimistic take. We’ll have more from Kane and the book as it becomes available. It debuts March 18th from HarperCollins.
PC manufacturers seem to be dropping like flies at present. Shortly after Sony confirmed it was selling its PC business and Vaio brand, LG is rumored to be planning its own exit from traditional PCs, to focus on smartphones, tablets and ‘convertible’ PCs (touchscreen Windows tablets that flip round into a laptop).
Other manufacturers are witnessing falling sales, prices and profits – with The Guardian calculating that the average profit per PC in the third quarter of 2013 fell to just £14.87 ($24.09). One manufacturer of conventional-format PCs, however, has remained almost immune to the trend: Apple …
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(Head to 37:40 in the video to see the telphone comparison)
Harry McCracken tracked down this video from the launch of the Macintosh that hasn’t been seen since 1984. It turns out there was a second ‘launch demo’ a week after the original launch at the shareholder meeting and the videographer forgot he had the video of that (woops!) in his garage. The audience this time wasn’t wasn’t Apple shareholders but actually members of the Boston Computer Society and the general public, which made for a different type of presentation. The quality and tone of the video is often much different than the one given a week earlier at the Flint Center on the De Anza College campus near Apple’s then HQ.
Over at YouTube, you can watch the Cupertino presentation, along with a sort of a rough draft held as part of an Apple sales meeting in Hawaii in the fall of 1983. As for the BCS version, all 90 minutes of it are there in the video at the top of this post, available for the first time in their entirety since they were shot on January 30, 1984.
The Cupertino and Boston demos may have been based in part on the same script, but the audience, atmosphere and bonus materials were different. In Cupertino, Jobs spoke before investors, towards the end of a meeting which also included dreary matters such as an analysis of Apple’s cash flow.
What’s particularly interesting to me and not part of any other videos I’ve seen was Jobs’ comparison of the Mac (and eventually by extension GUI interfaces) to the invention of the telephone. Fast forward the video above to about 37:40 to see it. As McCracken puts it, the Mac wasn’t necessarily competing with IBM machines but competing with no computer at all. This metaphor is striking in hindsight.
The video also has a Q&A with the original Mac team which is also pretty interesting if you are into that kind of thing.
McCracken has much more on the video here which is definitely worth a read.
The transcript of the Telephone/Telegraph bit pasted below:
As part of Apple’s 30th anniversary celebration of the Mac, Apple built a dedicated page to illustrate the evolution of the Mac year after year.
Each panel features line-drawn icon representing the Mac portraying that year, and a friend of mine, Greg Barbosa, noticed these icons are actually characters that make up a special font.
You can download the font to your Mac and explore each icon yourself, and I’ve created a gallery below to see each Mac drawing at high-res scale. Enjoy.
Update: T-shirts featuring the icons available on Teespring (black and white).
While there’s plenty of looking back going on today, Fortune has gathered together analyst forecasts of the Mac numbers we can expect Apple to reveal at its earnings call on Monday. This follows earlier forecasts for iPhone and iPad.
The average prediction is for 13 percent year-on-year growth, predicting that Apple sold 4.6 million Macs in the final quarter of 2013 (Apple’s fiscal Q1). This is slap bang in the middle of the growth predictions for iPads (10 percent) and iPhones (16 percent) …
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_d5R6Il0II]
Those of us old enough to have been around to witness the launch of the Mac can enjoy a good dose of nostalgia today, while those who weren’t can try to imagine just what the world was like before the Mac, thanks to two YouTube playlists.
EverySteveJobsVideo has put together a playlist of 18 Steve Jobs videos, from the launch of the Macintosh at the Apple shareholder event 30 years ago today, through internal videos, some early ads to a set of videos featuring not just the original “1984” ad, but alternative versions and the story of the making of the famous video.
EveryAppleAds (sic), meantime, has collected together the complete set of Get a Mac ads, with the hugely successful “Hello, I’m a Mac / And I’m a PC” format.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZSBWbnmGrE]
A tip we’ve received from an Apple Store employee indicates that Apple will be putting up celebratory LED window displays at Apple Stores, showing a stylised ‘3’ and a ‘Happy birthday, Mac’ message. iPhones and iPads in the window will reportedly be removed. The graphic came via special SD card.
Boxes of special t-shirts have arrived for the occasion (photo below the fold) …
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Ok, I admit it: I’m officially old. Old enough, in fact, to have bought the very first Macintosh in 1984: the Macintosh 128K.
Computers in those days had green screens and were controlled by typing arcane commands. Bold and italics did not appear on-screen, instead you saw ^Bthis is bold^B and ^Ythis is italics^Y (CTRL-Y for italics because CTRL-I was tab, for reasons no-one understood but didn’t question). You never had to worry about what typeface to use because computers could neither display nor print them.
And then came the Macintosh …
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In addition to interviews with the press, Apple is celebrating 30 years of Mac with a full-bleed graphic on its homepage, which links to a minisite that plots how the Mac evolved over the years. The message says that Apple made the Macintosh with a promise to get “the power of technology .. in the hand of everyone”. “This promise has been kept.”, it reads. The dedicated minisite depicts a (scrollable) timeline of the major models of Mac since 1984, spanning the PowerBook, the iMac and ending with the Retina MacBook Pro and the brand new Mac Pro.
See the accompanying video after the break.
With the Macintosh celebrating its 30th birthday today, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at some of the notable Macs we’ve seen over the past thirty years.
For each year, we’ve picked one notable machine. For some years, it was very hard to choose just one! Where prices are shown, the ‘equivalent’ price in brackets is the approximate cost of the machine in today’s money. For example, although the Macintosh 128K cost $2,495, that was the equivalent then of spending $5,600 today.
If you have fond memories of any of these machines, or any other Macs along the way, please share them in the comments …
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Update: We’ve got video of the interview, which also includes Craig Federighi and Bud Tribble.
ABC News has announced that it has interviewed Apple CEO Tim Cook regarding the 30th anniversary of the Mac. The interview will air tomorrow night on World News with Diane Sawyer at 6:30 PM EST. A small portion of the interview will be presented at 7 AM EST on Good Morning America…
Pixelmator have released the latest version of their app today, version 3.1. As usual, it is available exclusively in the Mac App Store for $29.99. Codenamed Marble, this update brings several enhancements to the image editor including specific Mac Pro optimizations such as 16-bit image support.
Primarily, Pixelmator 3.1 optimises for the new Mac Pro’s hardware. Apple has used Pixelmator before to tout the Mac Pro’s performance benefits, and the developers are clearly keen to push this further still.
The “exclusive” support for the new Mac Pro enables the simultaneous use of both GPU’s for even faster composition and rendering. In fact, the app can compute the autosave data whilst the image is being rendered. This translates to significant speed improvements across the app.
