Tech Industry

Ars today questions the recent rumors that NVIDIA might be entering the x86 processor market and taking Intel on directly.  The evidence claims come from industry rumors and the fact that NVIDIA is hiring up a lot of x86 talent including employees from Transmeta.

NVIDIA recently announced that it would be giving up its chipset work on Core and Nehalem series processors – which Apple use in their products – due to the ongoing litigation with Intel.

Bad NVIDIA chipsets had plagued Apple’s MacBooks and other industry products requiring Apple to provide unprecedented 3-year warranty replacement on bad motherboards.

Apple has a strong relationship with NVIDIA, using their chipsets in most of their current Macintosh products.  NVIDIA making x86 processors might lure Apple into changing processor providers, though unlikely.  Ars speculates that any NVIDIA x86 processors would likely be low to mid-range, at least initially.

See the guy at the right, he’s a Microsoft “Answer Bar” worker.  But he needs a caption.  Can anyone help him out?

via FakeSteve.

Hint: It may involve Windows XP.

While every handset maker and their dog’s brother is introducing their version of a touchscreen phone as the industry engages in a rearguard action against the Apple juggernaut, not every touchscreen keeps the customer satisfied, it seems.

New data from research firm, Canalysys, suggests the hype around touchscreen devices is driving the industry – everybody wants one, but not everyone’s so happy with the ones they’ve got.

According to the researchers, in Western Europe, 54% of people want their next phone to be a touchscreen device. That’s nice – but, sadly, of those who already have a touchscreen gadget, just 47% say they will stick with touch for their next handset – and it really does depend on which manufacturer produces the one they’ve already got.

For the most part, users of Apple or HTC devices will happily take touchscreen next time they choose a phone, but only 27% of those with Sony Ericsson handsets plan to.

"The results suggest that consumer awareness of touchscreen UIs is very high, driven by the marketing of Apple, Samsung and others," said analyst Pete Cunningham. “It is also apparent that, with experience, a significant proportion of users have not been totally won over by some of these devices,” he added.

“There has always been a question mark over how well touchscreens would work among an SMS-centric audience and the results indicate the transition has not been totally smooth.”

Interestingly, the survey also reverals that, from over 3,000 phone users, 38% would prefer a finger-based touchscreen phone, while 16% want a stylus-based touchscreen phone.

“We are at a critical time in the mobile industry,” commented Canalys VP Mike Welch. “The user awareness and interest is clearly there, and the opportunity to drive a mass change in user interaction, and hence device capabilities and the opening up of new application and service revenue streams, is tantalisingly close. But only if users continue to embrace these new UIs once they have tried them. This is the new arena in which mobile vendors must differentiate themselves, and the user experience battle will spread to other product categories, such as netbooks.”

Apple’s off to a slow start in iPhone sales in China, with carrier partner China Unicom confirming 5,000 sales of the device so far, since it went on sale last week.

Company president Lu Yimin characterised iPhone prices as “not expensive” during today’s Unicom shareholders meeting in Hong Kong. However, the iPhone costs maybe 26 per cent more than similar smartphones in Hong Kong (that also include Wifi), which industry observers fear may depress sales of Apple’s device in the world’s most populous country.

Over 700 million Chinese subscribe to wireless services. It’s estimated Apple may sell 460,000 iPhones each year in China – which Bloomberg reflects is less than the number of grey market iPhones currently sold there.

Despite this, China Unicom chairman, Chairman Chang Xiaobing, said, "We are satisified with iPhone sales so far, and we aim to have an additional 1 million new 3G subscribers each month in the near future.”

China Unicom has signed up over one million 3G subscribers so far. China Mobile and China Telecom will also launch 3G services in the coming months.

In August, Unicom signed a three-year non-exclusive deal to sell Apple’s popular iPhone in China.

Remember all those rumours of Apple planning a subscription-based service for iTunes? The ones that began way back in 2005, when the company hired XBox Live staffer, Julia Miller?

Seems this chatter’s back again, with Peter Kafka’s MediaMemo claiming Apple to have been in talks with TV networks in an attempt to put together a $30 all-you-can-eat TV subscription service.

This service, which may well appeal to companies not yet signed-up to NBC,ABC and Fox’s Hulu service, and which can also be seen as extending the Apple TV model into business currently occupied by satellite and cable TV services, seems set to launch “early next year”, if anyone signs up.

At present, Apple is assessing what degree of support there is for the notion among TV services.  Kafka says no one has yet signed up.

These subscription plans through iTunes wouldn’t be device-specific, though it is likely you’d be able to access content using iTunes clients, including computers, iPhones, iPods and Apple TV devices.

August saw similar reports, this time from Piper Jaffray analyst, Gene Munster, who predicted Apple would introduce subscription services for TV shows way back in August this year.

“Such a product would effectively replace a consumer’s monthly cable bill (~$85/month) and offer access to current and older episodes of select shows on select channels,” said Munster, according to Loop Insight.

Success will depend on Apple being able to offer the breadth of content you get from cable services and broadcasters. It would also depend on shows being made available in a timely fashion.

If the company succeeds in winning support from TV networks, it would enter a market currently served by Netflix, and Hulu; with YouTube also expected to offer full-length TV shows more widely in the coming year.

This means Apple has a chance at securing broadcaster permission for the plan, as they are more prepared to engage with online services now than before. One source told MediaMemo: “I think they might get it right this time”.

Apple may also have a surprise in its plan, in terms of enabling broadcasters to claw back a little of the ads revenue they would otherwise lose in ads-free subscriptions.

Apple has advanced plans for an ads-funded iTunes service.

These plans first came to light in July, when it was revealed that Apple presented a UK Judge-presided tribunal with advanced plans for an ads-funded service.

iTunes VP Eddie Cue told the Tribunal that iTunes would only pay advertising revenue where it is earned “as a result of an advertisement, sponsorship or a click-through link located on a Licensed service … and only where the Licensed Service is offered to the user at a price which has been artificially depressed to reflect such revenue.”

Recall last week when we learned at least one major European carrier has reached some kind of deal to offer mini video projectors to iPhone customers? Well, seems there may be more to this story than we first thought, with a Taiwanese firm involved in creating such pico projectors predicting massive growth next year – really massive growth.

In fact, according to Claude Hsu, president of Taiwan’s Young Optics, shipments of pico projectors for handsets will grow to 10-25 million units in 2012, compared to 20,000-30,000 in 2009.

Even though he says these figures are estimates that’s one heck of an expectation of a sales rise, particularly in comparison to his estimate of the size of the entire pico projector market for 2009 -170,000-180,000 units.

Hsu predicts projector shipments will climb sharply next year as “major handset vendors, such as Samsung Electronics, are expected to step up efforts for the market segment.”

We suspect these major vendors may well include a small Cupertino-based company. We’re just saying, right…

Via: DigiTimes
 

We all knew Seinfeld had a Mac at his house for all of those years on his show.  Then Microsoft paid him $10 million to do a few PC commercials.  But really, when not getting paid to say otherwise, we know he uses a Mac.  This week’s Curb Your Enthusiasm had him at his desk a new 15-inch MacBook Pro.

via TUAW

Adobe and Apple may not yet have inked a deal to bring Flash support to the iPhone, but that hasn’t stopped the Photoshop developer from adding a few next-gen smartphone-focused features to Adobe AIR, which promises a slew of these in its next version upgrade.

Just look at these features and tell us Apple didn’t force industry change when it introduced the MultTouch-savvy iPhone (which now accounts for one-in-forty cellphones sold worldwide, BTW).

As revealed by Adobe AIR application developer, Christian Cantrell, Adobe AIR 2.0 will be the nads when it comes to smartphone and tablet device usage. And the software’s set to ship next year, we’ve learned.

As Apple does already, so the Adobe app will add support for Multi-touch and gesture-based controls – though not both at once (”Applications can listen for multi-touch events, or gesture events (not both at the same time)”, the developer warns.”

    •    Multi-touch: Touch events are similar to mouse events, but on multi-touch enabled devices, you can track multiple touch points simultaneously.

1. – Multi-touch support:
2. – Windows 7 and beyond.
3. – Requires multi-touch enabled hardware (obviously).

    •    Gestures: Applications can listen for multi-touch events, or gesture events (not both at the same time). Gestures are the synthesis of multi-touch events into a single event.

1. – Gesture support:
2. – Windows 7 and beyond.
3. – Macs running 10.6 and beyond with multi-touch trackpads.
4. – Type of gestures we support:

• GESTURE_TWO_FINGER_TAP (tapping with two fingers)
• GESTURE_PRESS_AND_TAP (holding one finger down, then tapping with another — convention on some Windows devices for bringing up context menus)
• GESTURE_PAN
• GESTURE_ROTATE
• GESTURE_SWIPE
• GESTURE_ZOOM

Better security, the capacity to open files with selected default apps, native processes to reduce the load of running Air 2.0 apps (basically AIR 2.0 will be smart enough to direct some of its operations to features native on multiple platforms – handy).

There’s dozens of other features likely of interest to developers, including extended support for different sockets, network management, DNS resolution and more.

Accesibility gets a boost too, with the same level of support for such features as already available in Flash.

A beta of AIR 2.0 will be on Adobe Labs late this year. The software should go some way to answering critics who avoid use of AIR because they demand too much memory and aren’t always great performers, with Adobe promising a whole bunch of improvements to boost performance.

Mac users should see multitouch support in those AIR apps they use as these elements are introduced.
 

Way back in 2006 the mobile phone industry looked very different – fast forward to today and new entrant Apple now accounts for 2.5 per cent of global handset sales with its iPhone – not bad for a product which only began to emerge internationally later in 2007.

Strategy Analytics reports Apple’s 7.4 million iPhones shipped internationally worldwide in Q3 2009 gives the Cupertino company a record 2.5 percent marketshare.

“Apple is expanding its distribution networks into all major
regions worldwide and this is driving its volume growth,” the analysts observed.

According to the analysts, this climb in share comes as global mobile handset shipments fell 4 percent year-over-year, to reach 291 million units in Q3 2009. The rate of decline was slower than the previous quarter, as the market edged toward recovery. “We forecast the handset industry to return to positive growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, signaling an end to the recession,” the analysts opined.

Neil Mawston, Director at Strategy Analytics, added, "We forecast 300 million handsets to be shipped worldwide in Q4 2009, growing 3% from 294 million units in Q4 2008. We believe this will be the first time the industry has returned to positive growth since Q3 2008, signaling an end to the handset recession after 4 quarters of decline. Consumers and handset vendors are gradually regaining a little confidence."

Apple’s good news follows a ChangeWave Research survey which said from June to September, Apple’s share of the US market jumped from 25 to 30 percent, while competitors RIM and Palm basically stayed unchanged.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world in 2007, he mentioned that Apple had set a goal for itself to reach one percent of the mobile phone market share.

Apple met that goal in 2008, hitting 1.1 percent of the 1.21 billion mobile phone shipments, according to ABI Research.

Additional Strategy Analytics findings include:

Samsung shipped 60.2 million handsets worldwide and captured a record 21 percent marketshare in Q3 2009. Samsung now sits alongside Nokia and Motorola as the only three vendors to have passed the 20 percent threshold during the past decade;

LG Electronics shipped 31.6 million handsets worldwide during Q3 2009, for 11 percent marketshare. The South Korean vendors Samsung and LG captured almost one-third of the entire global handset market between them.
 

We all know Apple’s cooking something up – feverish market speculation, high-level meetings with publishers for eBook discussions, increased r&d spend all reinforce the notion the company has something up its sleeve – we all think it’s some form of tablet.

Now this speculation seems set to climb even higher with a source telling Business Insider that Apple engineers have been engaged in frequent trips from Cupertino to China.

“A source tells us a system integration engineer friend of his at Apple has been ramping up his travels back and forth between China lately, broadcasting word of his travels over the Internet,” the report claims.

What makes this even more interesting is that engineers are currently booked to head to China across the Holiday season, meeting with Apple’s manufacturers out there, presumably Foxconn, who we were earlier told has been contracted to produce 300,000 of the still unannounced tablet-type devices (dubbed ‘Slate’ according to the NYT) each and every month.

Meanwhile, fresh news from Australia lends a little more light on Apple’s plans to position its new device as some form of eBook reader on steroids: "It seems they’re trying to preload it with content deals, rather than just create an elegant general-purpose device," Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, told NewsFactor.

"If you got some really impressive experience, it would certainly accelerate the transition from print to digital,” he observed, saying Apple’s solution plus those such as Kindle could, “generate enough enthusiasm to advance the transition."

If previous reports are true, Apple intends wooing publishers by offering them a much better deal than Amazon: While the latter firm demands 70 percent of revenues raised through eBooks, Apple wants just 30 percent.

His voice now reminds us of/makes this seem like an Apple ad…which it sort of is.  Might want to watch this quick, it might not be up for long.

We like this story – here’s a picture of the Apple tablet – no, not that Apple tablet, but the unreleased tablet that never made the light of day and was internally developed by the company way back c.1990.

We didn’t find this little gem – that honour goes to TechCrunch, but here’s the story:

“The Pen Mac was a fully functional Mac computer (it even played the Mac startup chime) with a pen based touch screen. The screen itself was identical to the Mac Portable, but with the addition of pen touch. And of course the case was a lot smaller than the Mac Portable. The Pen Mac was supposedly not much more than one inch thick. Users could plug in a keyboard and mouse or easier input.”

Seems the man in the picture, Glam CEO Samir Arora, was involved in the product design, but these systems were eventually shelved in favour of the Newton handheld.

Interesting, huh? In the words of a famous song, “History Repeating”.

Though this Pen Mac makes a MacBook look thin (which they are) – see here.
 

Apple’s iPhone is biting at the heels of current consumer smartphone favourite, RIM’s BlackBerry, with more consumers than ever now favouring the Apple phone.

ChangeWave Research director, Paul Carton, dropped us a line today to let us know the findings of ChangeWave’s latest Consumer Smart Phone survey, titled, “Apple Soars Behind iPhone 3GS Momentum”.

The September 14-21 survey offers a look at the impact of the new Apple and Palm offerings – along with an update on Research In Motion and overall smartphone industry trends going forward.

The survey of 4,255 consumers shows strong growth continues in the smart phone market, with 39% of respondents now reporting they own a smart phone – up 2-pts since June and nearly double the level of two years ago.

“Looking ahead,” ChangeWave informs, “while the current survey shows a slight dip in consumer buying plans for the next 90 days, that’s to be expected in the aftermath of the huge iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre product launches back in June.”

Interstingly, 11.6% of consumer surveyed now say they plan on buying a smart phone in the next 90 days – 3-pts less than in June but still one of the highest percentages ever recorded in a ChangeWave survey.

With 40% share, RIM remains the current market share leader among consumers, but has fallen 1-point since the previous survey and is at its lowest level in two years.

Apple – which now has 30% share – has “seen a huge market share jump since the previous survey,” ChangeWave tells us. “Not only has the iPhone 3GS release enabled them to gain 5-pts overall – for the first time it has also placed them within striking distance of the number one spot in the consumer market.”

Palm (7%) remains far behind in third place, but we note that this is the first survey in nearly two years where its share hasn’t fallen – and that’s a clearly encouraging sign.

There’s more: Apple remains the leader in terms of planned buying going forward — 36% of those who plan to purchase a smart phone in the next 90 days say they’ll get an iPhone.

More important, the iPhone continues to maintain the highest customer satisfaction rating in the industry among major cell phone manufacturers — with 74% of owners reporting they’re Very Satisfied with their iPhone.

Another day, another Apple media-related tablet rumour, and this time the leak’s coming from way down under, Australia. That’s where the Sydney Morning Herald has reportedly been chatting with high level media people as it ties deals together to present Slate as the world’s best eBook reader.

Apple’s talking with media execs to firm up deals to get their content available to the device, tipped to be a larger version of the iPhone that’s small enough for a handbag but won’t fit your pocket.

The company has reportedly shared device specifications with media companies in order to find out if they want to offer their content to it.

This news follows word from New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who told staff in a meeting he didn’t know would be filmed and published as video online: "I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate, or whatever comes after that."

In Australia, Fairfax Media’s director of marketing and newspaper sales, Robert Whitehead, hinted that he was aware of the upcoming device in August.

"We’re continuously examining all options for extending the reach of our mastheads and we’ll be very interested to see what Apple comes up with," he said.

The report suggests Apple is offering a much better deal than Amazon does for publishers launching Kindle content – while Amazon takes the lion’s share of the 70.30 split, Apple’s deal sees the computer company taking just 30 percent.

This likely reflects Apple CEO Steve Job’s recent comments to the New York Times, in which he characterised eBooks as “not a big business” for Apple, predicted standalone eBook readers won’t do as well as multi-use devices, and voiced doubt at the depth of Amazon’s Kindle sales.

That Apple has intended to present the new device as an eBook reader of some kind has been known for some time, as a wave of eBook publishers have been enthusiastically making content available via the App Store.

The tablet is expected to host a 10-inch screen, WiFI and 3G connectivity, and to offer all the iPod features (music, film, video, audiobooks), along with the capacity to run some iPhone apps, as well as to offer a sophisticated eBook reader, potentially itself using technologies the company may have quietly acquired.

That last slice of speculation has a history in previous moves – for example, Apple purchased Cassady & Greene’s SoundJam app in order to provide the architecture for iTunes in advance of the release of the iPod.

Foxconn has reportedly been contracted to produce 300,000 units of the new device each month, a device Apple has been engaged in development of since at least 2003.
 

Fresh from helping create a shortage of flash memory components, Apple seems set to create yet another shortage, this time reducing one supplier’s stock of image sensors, as used in the iPhone and iPod nano cameras.

While news that strong seasonal demand from Apple will hit supplies from OmniVision of these image sensors is bound to spark another hubbub of expectation Apple may field cameras inside the iPod touch (we don’t anticipate this until after Christmas), it seems strong iPhone sales are culprit.

With all those iPhones churning out, and now with distribution in China and through multiple carriers in formerly exclusive countries such as the UK, Apple execs are clearly working to high demand projections. Digitimes informs, “Tight supply is not expected to ease until late November 2009, the sources pointed out.

“Apple has increased fourth-quarter orders for the iPhone 3GS to its Taiwan-based manufacturing partners Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) and Primax Electronics by 17-20%,” the report says.

Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones in its last quarter, representing seven percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Suggestions the company has raised manufacturing orders by up to 20 percent is bound to drive Wall Street’s number-crunchers to upwardly revise their current estimates for Q1 and FY2010 iPhone 3GS sales, as this could point to an additional 1.2-1.5 million sales over and beyond the c.6/7 million units consensus estimates that are being bandied around.

We’ll wait and see.

[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AYGpuiEC]

Symbian CEO, Lee Williams, speaks with GigaOm’s Om Malik – and had some interesting observations on Google and Apple.

Recent analysis forecasts that by 2012 Google Android will be the second most popular smartphone OS, behind Symbian, the operating system that powers most of Nokia’s high-end phones.

According to Gartner, Android’s share will be at 18 percent of all smartphones sold globally in 2012, or about 94 million users out of 525 million. Apple seems set to be third, or fourth in the list, slightly behind or slightly in front of Research In Motion, those figures claim.

It’s interesting then to hear what the boss of Symbian sees as the real threat.

Some interesting observations from Williams:

– If Google isn’t evil why is evil mentioned in its mission statement?
– Symbian is working to get its OS into handsets from a wider field of manufacturers, particularly in that future smartphone battle-ground, China.
– Work continues to get Symbian involved in online content in some way.

The Engadget Show this week featured Steve Ballmer:

http://www.viddler.com/simple_on_site/cfad499

BoyGenius has the Droid review up and fankly, they’re pretty smitten with it.   It looks a little "square" to us but we have to admit, that 850×480 screen  has us a bit green. The "not on AT&T’s network" part also sounds nice except for international travel. 

They say the Android 2.0 "Eclair" software is also much more refined.  It is interesting to note that this is the first Android-based phone with the ARM Cortex A8-class chips that the iPhone and Pre have.  In fact, it has the same TI OMAP 3430 CPU as the Pre.

Interestingly, they mention that this won’t compete with the iPhone:

The Droid isn’t an iPhone competitor because nothing at this point in time is an iPhone competitor besides the new iPhone. And things don’t have to be right now. Everyone can eat. So will the Motorola Droid be successful? Absolutely, we think. It will eat in to BlackBerry sales, Windows Mobile sales, and positively murder any lingering Palm Pre sales. It’s that good. Did you notice how Verizon still hasn’t announced the BlackBerry Storm2?

You can’t underestimate the love lavished on Amazon’s Kindle among UK first adopters – the giant retailer’s sold a fair few of its eBook reading devices to Mac user’s here in the UK – and now it seems the company plans to release a Kindle reader for the Mac.

The news follows Microsoft’s declaration during its Windows 7 launch that Amazon is developing a reader for that platform.

Now Fast Company informs Amazon is developing the same for the Mac, citing a company spokesperson who said, “Yes, we are working on a Kindle app for Mac.”

This is interesting news as Apple allegedly engages in development of its own eBook-reading solution (in part) with its rumoured tablet product, as activity in the eBook space increases in intensity.
 

Regrets, we’ve all had a few, and sometimes Hell’s pathway’s paved with good intentions. This morning we’re hearing all about the first emerging v.1.0 flaws in Microsoft’s newly-released Windows 7.0 OS – and it looks like poor impoverished student PC users have been hit with the newest identified bug in the newly-shipping Microsoft public beta.

Engadget is reporting that “quite a few people have had issues installing the downloadable $29 student upgrade edition on 32-bit Vista”.

Seems the file doesn’t unpack properly, and rather than becoming an OS installer magically transforms itself into one executable file and two non-functioning bundles. And then the whole install process bugs out, as it tries to run a 64-bit task on these 32-bit systems.

Microsoft is “looking into it”, the report states.

Still – looks like some of the people are having some fantastic parties – is that a bloatware burger??

Nokia’s move to slam a lawsuit down against the Apple juggernaut’s profit phone hasn’t dented iPhone enthusiasm one little bit.

The device is impacting everywhere right now, with Apple’s iPhone component partners in particularly jubilant mood as millions of the devices shift every 13 weeks.

Don’t believe us? Just take a look at a gaggle of small Taiwanese firms – Yageo, Cyntec, Polytronics Technology, Mag.Layers Scientific-Technics, Thinking Electronic and TXC – all of whom faced steep revenue decline in the current quarter in the generally depressed tech market.

As we know, Apple isn’t part of the “generally depressed tech market”, which is why those small firms are breathing a little easier following this week’s Apple results call, as they now know they’re going to see, “narrower revenue declines or flat revenues in the fourth quarter of 2009 thanks to the popularity of Apple’s iPhone”.

That’s good news for all Apple’s component suppliers, and pretty good news for the company’s growing army of iPhone app developers. To get a sense of that opportunity take a look at the Business Week video we posted earlier, and consider this:

DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole thinks the worldwide mobile and portable games market will reach $11.7 billion by 2014, which includes the PSP and DS, with Apple’s devices pushing 24 percent of software sales. He does expect Nintendo and Sony to lead the pack, but what’s not to love about Apple’s elegant and simple direct route to consumers through the App Store.

Happy consumers equate to happy developers (particularly since they can now get creative with in-app purchasing), happy carriers (just swoon at AT&T’s recent turn-on of 3.2 million iPhones in the US in its last quarter) and happy hardware and component manufacturers.

All this success is creating its own brand awareness mindwave, with a generation of US computer users now seeing Apple as the company which offers the solutions they can most relate to.

Think about what came out of this week’s Web 2.0 Summit, where Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy sat down with five US teens to find out what tomorrow’s people think about all this pervasive internet-connected social network-driven apps and taps milawakey…the upshot, of course, is “Teens love Facebook and Apple…and are confused by Twitter.”

“The kids also had good things to say about Apple. One said Apple had “won” with it’s “I’m a Mac vs. I’m a PC” television commercials, while another declared, “Windows would be a good prison guard, because it always locks up.””

Interestingly, the teens remarked that “all the hot girls use Hotmail”, and none of them owned an iPhone, which just goes to reinforce the notion that despite our excitement at the hottest and newest technologies, most human beings take time getting down to drink at the new tech pond.

So, where’s all this going? Quite plainly put – while Apple’s competitors seem engaged in an endless race just to catch up on where the company was yesterday, Apple is already in poll position to take on another apparition once today’s teens turn twenty and begin to invest in the gadgets they love once they start to pull in some of their own money.

And Microsoft? Microsoft, for all its anti-Apple-seeming ad campaign, is really engaged on a mission to convince Windows XP users (who let’s face it are customarily an older bunch of consumers than tomorrow’s people) that Win 7 (which has a few set-up problems in MediaCentre, we’re hearing) is as cutting-edge and cool as the Mac Redmond really really wants its existing veteran customers to avoid defection too.

No sense underestimating Ballmer’s boys and girls, however, they have succeeded in breaking some sales records with their new OS – but while Apple’s partners are currently seeing success, Microsoft’s wide collective PC industry continues to attempt to manage its way through a shrinking market, praying the software firm will make it rain with it’s all-new OS release.

Apple’s betting that rain falls over to the California coastline too, and so are those small and large component manufacturers way over there in China and Taiwan…

Hope you enjoyed this spattering of news, fact, and opinionated speculation.