Archive for December 13th, 2011

Analyst Mark Moskowitz with J.P. Morgan expects that MacBook Air sales will reach an average of 1.6 million units per quarter over the next 12 months. In the third quarter of calendar 2011, Apple sold 923,000 units of the MacBook Air, representing 838.6 percent year-over-year growth. Comparing with the previous quarter MacBook Air sales grew by 43.8 percent, outpacing total Mac unit growth of 17.1 percent.

China is now becoming a strong driver for growth of MacBook Air sales. Last quarter, MacBook Air units grew 339 percent year over year in China, versus 76.5 percent for the rest of the Mac lineup. Moreover, notebooks based on Intel's Ultrabook specification are highly unlikely to be a significant threat to the MacBook Air.

"In general, we think that Ultrabooks are highly-discretionary devices, and pricing on competitive offerings must fall below $800 before posing a viable threat to Apple's MacBook Air," he wrote in a note to investors. "In our view, Apple's first mover advantage and optimized feature set and form factor command a higher price that early adopters, productivity users, and Apple enthusiasts are willing to absorb."

On Monday Apple revealed that over 100 million downloads were made via its Mac App Store in less than one year of availability.

"In just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry," said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "With more than 100 million downloads in less than a year, the Mac App Store is the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world."

There are now more than 500,000 applications in App Stores for iOS and the Mac that were downloaded more than 18 billion times. More than one billion applications are downloaded per month there. Noteworthy, Apple Stores helped developers achieved success with their applications. Here some comments from the developers whose applications are now available in the Mac App Store.

"The Mac App Store has unparalleled reach and has completely transformed our distribution and development cycle," said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. "Offering Pixelmator 2.0 exclusively on the Mac App Store allows us to streamline updates to our image editing software and stay ahead of the competition."

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Many Apple fans are interested in discovering hints of Apple's future iOS devices in various configuration files in each beta and public version of iOS. Such references provide essentially no information on the new devices themselves. Most of them simply appear in the form of "iPhone4,1" that meant the iPhone 4S as one example, but they are carefully watched as hints of what devices Apple is likely to be testing with the software at the moment and perhaps how many variations of an upcoming device there might be.

But today Apple has tried to obscure that information having released 5.1 beta 2 with numerous fake references within configuration files. For example, USBDeviceConfiguration.plist has listed about two dozen different device variants.

As discovered by 9to5Mac's Mark Gurman, that list has now ballooned to well over 100 such entries as Apple has seeded it with dozens of new fake references to such future products as "iPad10,1", "iPhone11,3", "iPod11,1", and "AppleTV8,3".

Apple has made more difficult to identify new product, though the change does not shut out examination of the evidence entirely, as unaltered listings are still visible in other locations.

Today market research company Strategy Analytics reported on its research which covers «connected TV players», such as Ruku and Apple TV. The report shows that Apple is expected to reach sales of 4 million Apple TV boxes for 2011, leading the growing market with a 32 percent share.

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