Today's Special Apple Event: Focus on Mac--Our Take
Somewhat masked by all the iPhone hoopla is that Macs, especially notebooks, are flying off the shelves at stores and via FedEx at a record pace. More Macs were sold last quarter that ended June 30th than in any quarter in Apple's history, over 1.7 million of them. Macs are selling at a rate three times that of the PC industry and, as a result, Apple's Macs are gaining significant market share both at home and abroad!
All this is really great news. It is especially satisfying to those of us who endured years in the pit of derision created by the market success of Windows 95, a Mac OS ripoff, and the dark ages of Apple vision at the very top of the company. During that time three great ideas were irretrievably fumbled--the Newton, the PowerPC CPU and Mac OS licensing--and the Mac almost passed into oblivion.
As long-time readers know, we, more than most (possibly any), give credit to Gil Amelio for laying the right foundation blocks for recovery. If nothing more, one simply has to give him some credit for committing CEO sacrifice by bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple along with the operating system that became Mac OS X whether under the spell of the infamous Jobsian reality distortion field or not. Of course, it has been the leadership, vision and savvy of Steve Jobs that has brought Apple the winning sequence of iMac, iBook, Mac OS X, Apple Store, iPod, Intel, iPhone and the current Mac marketplace explosion. What better time to strike?
During Apple's third quarter financial conference call with analysts, CFO Peter Oppenheimer mentioned product transition costs as one of three significant reasons for the projected decrease in gross margins for the fourth quarter, the one we are currently in. The other two were increased part costs and the usual back-to-school promotional activities. Significant "product transition costs" means one thing to many of us--new and/or radically redesigned hardware products.
Well, yes, there will be the transition to Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" but how much can it cost to print up a bunch of DVDs after most all of the labor spent to produce the code has already been booked? So, it must mean new Macs, right? We think so. Even though it has been awhile since the last iPod refreshment, we think that will wait until the big holidays season, giving the iPhone ("...the best iPod ever made..." according to Jobs) time to get more traction. It's gotta be new Macs and Macs are the topic of today's Special Apple Event.
Okay, so which Macs? The Displays? And what about iLife, iWork and .Mac? The latter is easy since Apple sent .Mac members a fairly direct message as follows:
Due to scheduled maintenance, .Mac members might be intermittently unable to access some .Mac services from 10 AM to 12 PM PDT on 08/07/2007. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Since that is the exact time of the Special Apple Event, an update to .Mac appears to be a no brainer but what feature(s)? We don't know.
iLife and iWork haven't seen a significant update since January of 2006 so that is why we called their update at Macworld a no brainer. We were dead wrong. Our guess is that they will wait for Leopard, probably after its release and during Macworld 2008.
Back to the Macs--iMacs, Mac minis, Xserves and Mac Pros haven't been significantly updated for a long time and, as we pointed out last week, the heaviest bets are on iMacs. There are rumors like new iMac pricing that is the same as the old pricing except at the high end and a thin brushed aluminum keyboard along with reported scarcity of the current design but we are unsure of their authenticity. Still, and we agree on the iMacs. The iMacs are consumer goods and a well-received significant refresh would contribute to increased sales.
If the Mac minis are not killed off as rumor would have it, they should get upgraded. We think that recent sales trends will determine if the Mac mini survives another cycle. It just may be that with Apple TV and schools purchasing MacBooks and low end iMacs, the people with good monitors and keyboards moving relatively cheaply to a Mac desktop may not be sufficient. After all, a comparable iMac is a real bargain. But we're hoping that these cool Macs hang in there and get an upgrade--a much larger hard drive, more base memory and faster Core 2 Duo CPUs. A slightly changed case so as to incorporate a desktop 3.5" hard drive rather than a 2.5" notebook hard drive would be great.
We don't see anything for the Xserve server or Mac Pro. The latter received a new more efficient internal case design the last bump to quad and dual quad core CPUs. Perhaps some improvement in the graphics and hard drive departments might be in order to keep up with the market.
The only potential new Mac we see is a replacement for the 12" PowerBook G4 that did not make the transition to Intel. A very thin and light ultra portable Apple notebook has been rumored for some time. While we would certainly like to see Apple make one since we're holding onto our 12" PowerBook G4 with that hope, we think it would take something wildly new that would allow Apple to make money in this specialized road warrior market.
New LED backlit Cinema displays could be a lot thinner, lighter and cooler but it is hard to conceive how Apple could significantly improve its gorgeous displays in other ways unless they did something radical like curve them for better 3D visual effects.
We'll know in just a few hours. Look for our report and commentary late today. [Bill Fox & Dana Baggett]
Saw something? Send a tip
The archive ran on reader tips. What did you see, where, and do you want the credit?