Archive for November 6th, 2010

This week Apple announced that it is going to discontinue Xserve after January 31, 2011. Apple will not be developing a future version of Xserve. Customers may choose between the Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server, and the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server. Both systems should replace existing Xserve systems. The documentation notes that the 12-core Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server meets or exceeds the performance of the baseline Xserve hardware. The Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server, on the other hand, is significantly outperformed by Xserve, but it has been Apple's most popular server system since its introduction in the fall of 2009.

In the screenshot above, you can see a Macbook Air with a picture of the new Mac App store, which divines some potential prices for Apple's official apps.  This is directly from Apple’s website. So, what are the prices? Turns out they're pretty close to current software prices. The iLife apps are priced out at $14.99, while the iWork apps are priced at $19.99, and when you add them all up, they cost about the same as the bundles you can buy in the Apple retail store. There's also a few other titles at various prices. There's a dice game called Roll 'Em which is priced for free, an app called Color Studio at $29.99, and another game called Fast Lane priced at just $4.99.  If this is a real picture of what some of the Mac apps might cost then it will be interesting to see what we get when the store officially opens.

If you ever wondered what Apple thought were the very best apps of the last two years, there’s now a list for that. Apple has launched a new section of the iTunes App Store, a Hall of Fame, containing everything iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad from Angry Birds to Zen Bound 2. There are around 50 apps honored so far and includes news, travel, sports, entertainment, productivity, and of course, lots of great games. The list includes both free and paid apps. Apple did a great job selecting these. Of course, they were probably helped by the massive app sales data they have. Most, if not all of the apps, are fairly “obvious” choices that you probably already own.

What app is now on the top of the list? No wondering, it is Angry Birds.

Apple seeds Mac OS X 10.6.6 build 10J521 to developers on Thursday ahead of the public release of Mac OS X 10.6.5. The changelog for Mac OS X 10.6.6 notes that the beta "contains developer support for fetching and renewing App Store receipts." App Store receipts could be a reference to the recently announced Mac App Store that is coming to Snow Leopard in the next three months. Strangely, the download is only 3.7MB. The last update to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard came in the form of 10.6.4 in June. Mac OS X 10.6.4 resolved issues with the trackpad and Adobe's Creative Suite 3.

This week Barron's site published a forecast of Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair, which reveals details on Apple’s suggested progress based on the study of the company's supply chain. He is assured the Cupertino's company will sell 100 million iPhones, which in turn means almost 100% year over year sales growth for the device in 2011. Besides that, the analyst also suggested the number of iPads sold will reach 45-48 million next year.

Read the rest of this entry »