erstwhile

Did iPhone Sales Pass 10M Already?

Astounding. Fanbois bleating up AAPL. I wouldn't touch this stock for a while.

AAPL is going to be facing more and more competition in the Market. Ballmer is right, an iPod that can make calls has an appeal to a limited market. As more competent smartphones arrive (Android will spur a ton of interesting devices) the competition will increase. The non ATT carriers are greatly incentivized to break the iPhone's lock on the market.

Apple were there first with the Apple ][ and the iPhone could be another case of the SJ driven company painting itself into a corner while the market matures and moves forward.

It's called capitalism - have you heard of it?

Look AAPL is always a risky stock. Apple will be greatly affected by the storm in the economy, precisely because it is a premium product that carries a big mark up for it's industrial design. So if the US consumer's discretionary income is hit, AAPL sales will be hit. Since AAPL is propped up by people "hoping" it can run up again, it's generally a stock that is overvalued (much like it's producs), and therefore considerably volatile.

AAPL is down 40% over the last 12 months, MSFT is down less than 20%, the DJIA is down around 30%.

You can slag MSFT all you like, but as a company they are stronger and less exposed (whilst AAPL is attempting to morph into a retailer, and move away from solely being a hardware company, it's not there yet). They have a diverse customer base (business to consumer).

Beware AAPL.

Another Salvo in the Apple vs. Microsoft Ad War

>You've got to be kidding. The Mac OS is a variation of Unix.
>If you don't think Unix "gets things done," you don't know much
>about the history of computing.

Yeah, but...

I first used unix on a pdp11/40 in 1985. Truth to tell it seemed kind of clunky even then, especially compared to RSTS/E, Tops/10 and VAX/VMS which were concurrent at that time. Later I supported and programmed both Ultrix (DEC's unix and VMS). I preferred VMS to unix, it was a lot more secure, though Ultrix ran a lot faster on the same hardware as VMS. Later I was an engineer for Apple in Cupertino for nearly 15 years.

I have Macs and PCs at home. The Macs are fine. Computers are a tool, not an object of worship.

I run my home entertainment system on a Sony PC running Vista. It has dual HDTV tuners with Cablecard, I connect to Comcast's network and record HD and std def video. Pray tell me how I can do that on a Mac? AppleTV by comparison is a toy. No HD video, unless, by some stretch you think 720p - DVD Resolution - has somehow become HD.

I also have a PC that is equivalent to a Mac mini for mail and web browsing. It's based on an Intel® Desktop Board D945GCLF with Integrated Intel® Atom™ Processor (Motherboard, 945GC Express, Atom 230 Processor, MiniITX, Max 2GB DDR2, PCI, FENET, Video, Audio,SATA). The entire computer cost $320. For 2GB RAM, SATA disk drive, case and PSU, Optical drive.

It runs Vista Home Premium.

And runs it really well.

The Macs run 10.5.5. A Mac Mini compared to the D945GCLF based Intel box performs about the same. The D945GCLF based machine has everything hardware wise the Mac Mini has, but uses an Airport Express for it's wireless support. It's also HALF the price.

The PCs get more use in our household than the Macs. iLife is good, in general. iTunes is feeling creaky (it's pretty old - nearly 10 years, I found my soundjam disks from 1999 recently. Sound Jam was the product Apple bought and turned into iTunes). I compared iTunes 8 with the Zune 3.0 software, and I really like the UI and features the Zune 3.0 software has (iTunes has a slight edge on the ease of importing existing MP3 files). The Zune version of iTunes "genius" is graphically richer, functionally richer, and just seems more modern.

Unix is 30 years old. Linux is a rewrite. Mac OS X is based on BSD Unix which IIRC traces it's heritage back to the same release 7 unix the pdp11 I mentioned above ran. I dunno, that's hardly a "modern" OS, is it?

Rob Pike, who's been quite influential in unix circles gave a talk in 2000 entitled "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" where he largely bemoaned the fact that little actual real research was being done in the area of system software. To an extent OS X is lipstick on a pig (unix).

In the same talk Pike listed Microsoft as one of the few institutions (academic or industrial) actually doing tangible research. Like it, or not, NT was a whole new OS (Vista is a continuation of much of this work). The outline of his talk is here: <herpolhode.com/rob... (google "rob pike utah" if the URL gets stripped out. Dave Cutler, one of the architects on DEC's VMS O/S was also one of the key designers of NT.

Apple don't do research. They fired their 500 person "Advanced technology group" on Steve Job's return. They use others to do their research for them be it in computers (the Mac is a direct descendant of work done at Xerox, the mouse was developed by doug englebart) or in iPods: the first working disk based MP3 player was developed at DEC's western research labs in Palo-Alto. Creative labs visited, saw it and created the nomad jukebox, tony fadell developed the iPod at Apple.

Their genius is putting the ordinary in a beautiful box.

The Mac vs PC ads have really done a lot of damage to Vista. A lot of people are anti Vista, but have never used it. The fact of the matter is that Vista today is a great OS. I use both Vista and Mac OS X.

Last thing. Go to a bookstore. If you are technically inclined look at the computer books section in a large bookstore. How big is the Mac OS section? How big is the Windows/Visual C#/C++/Basic/.net/SQL Server etc section? I looked in Borders in Sunnyvale today. One shelf of Mac OS programming books, not full (Mac OS X internals, the Hillegass Cocoa book, a couple of XCode books). Five book CASES on the MS technologies.

The tools to allow developers to write software for Windows are a good deal more flexible, and a great deal richer than for Mac OS. Mac programming is still largely a cult activity. Read Apple's incomplete documents and search through the header files to figure out how things work. It's hard won knowledge and to that extent I'm not surprised the few that master it are so vociferous about the "greatness" of the platform.

Games? On the Mac? World of Warcraft is about the only first class citizen, the rest are pretty much all ports of PC games done by westlake interactive and other companies like them.

There's so many zealots on both sides. The reality is that both are great products. If you want photoshop it works on a PC but a lot of designers prefer a Mac. But outside of creative arts there's less of a clear cut choice. Vista for a home use is, as far as both myself (sure I'm a geek) and my wife and kids (they are not) a great choice.

The ads from Microsoft are interesting, I'll wait to see how they pan out. But so far they are a big improvement over Apple's suit guy, misrepresenting like a presidential candidate, and the smug yuppie with his false concern for the suit guy.

I'd like to see Microsoft rescue their rep with consumers. Quite a difference 15 years make. Apple are now the ones seemingly acting like a monopolist (cf Apple apps store, ITMS content really only running on Apple hardware, etc.).

Hey maybe I'm a PC?