Friday, May 18, 2007

Apple Stock Drops due to Engadget Story

http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/05/18/engadget/index.php

Apparently, websites like engadget might have some media clout. Recently, Apple stock dropped 2% due to a false rumour about the iPhone. They said that the release of the iPhone was going to be moved back to March, (don't panic) however the story was quickly corrected and the stock price went back to it's previous height.

Updated MacBooks

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131871-c,macnotebooks/article.html

Here is a story about the update on the macbook. They now have faster processors and larger drives along with more memory. I do not consider this a huge deal due to the fact that now the medium grade computer is now the lower ect.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

15 Apple Ads All Compiled Into One

Great Hillary Clinton/Apple ad Spoof

DVD Ripping Program

http://handbrake.m0k.org/

Well, I recently talked about how I would use my ripped movies on an iPhone. This is the program that can do it. It gives you the chance to mess with all the settings like the size, bitrate, formats, and what you want the viedo for. It has Apple TV support along with iPod and PSP. It is a great program and I hope ypu like it.

The iPhone

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

Well there it is, The iPhone. I want it. But, of course I live in the boston area whwere everyone including me has Verizon for it's much better reception. Hey, I love my macbook, but it simply is too big to carry everywhere, and it is too likely to be stolen. With the iPhone, I could update this blog on the road and down the cape (Cape Cod), also I could definitely watch some movies that I have ripped using HandBrake. Well, maybe if I'm lucky, in a couple of years the contract will run out with Cingular and Verizon may get a piece of the action.

I'm Back!

Allright, so know it has been a long time since I wrote on this blog and a lot of important things in the mac world have been overshadowed. For one, the iPhone was revealed. Also the shuffles went small and metal. So, to start off my return to blogging I am going to catch you up on some of the major apple stories. Also I will try to find and add all the apple commercials to the blog. And, one more thing, I am going to have to tell you about the new MacBook I just got.

Friday, December 15, 2006

Update on the Last Story


So, that whole thing about iTunes sales "plummeting" according to a Forrester Research report? Well, it turns out Forrester meant nothing of the kind.

You see, it's all the media's fault. (Isn't it always?)

So lets go back and look at the abstract of the original report: After looking at 2,700 US iTunes debit and credit card transactions, Forrester found that 3% of online households had made an iTunes purchase in the past year. It further says that consumers who buy at iTunes spent about $35 over the last year, with half of those transactions amounting to three dollars or less.

Now its important to remember something that consumers usually don't see when they use their credit cards: the vendor pays a fee for the right to accept your credit card. Huge companies like First Data, Alliance Data and smaller companies like iPayment make a lot of money processing credit card payments. First Data, for example, took in about $10 billion last year processing credit card transactions.

Those fees, are something that Forrester is worried about. Remember, there's isn't much to carve out of the revenue of a 99-cent song sale. Most of that 99 cents goes back to the record label, some of which, makes its way back to the artist. Apple has never disclosed the breakdown, but my hunch is that it doesn't keep much. A few cents have to go to Visa or Mastercard, depending on which card is used, a few more go to the companies that run the data networks that hand the transaction itself. A few cents also have to go to the cardholder's bank. If the fees are too high, there's not much left over for Apple, in which case the iTunes store becomes a money-losing operation, at least in theory.

"Our credit card transaction data shows a real drop between the January post-holiday peak and the rest of the year, but with the number of transactions we counted it's simply not possible to draw this conclusion . . . as we pointed out in the report. But that point was just too subtle to get into these articles," Forrester's Josh Bernoff wrote in reaction to the headlines about iTunes sales "plummeting" and "collapsing" and whatever adjective indicative of downward motion that may have been used in headlines hammering the report by irritated Apple fans. More after the jump....

One thing that really did go down was Apple's stock. It shed $2.41 on Dec. 12, but picked it all back up and more today, closing up $2.91.

Bernoff's intended point apparently got lost in all the horn-blowing headlines: iTunes sales appear, based on the available data, to be leveling off. And he's not the first to say so. The Wall Street Journal last week mentioned in a story that Nielsen Soundscan has been seeing the same thing in the music download business for two solid quarters. In fact, they're down slightly, at 137 million tracks in each of the last two quarters, from 144 million tracks in the first quarter of the year.

Finally Bernoff says that Apple is incredibly stingy about the information it releases, and I agree. On one hand, Apple loves nothing more than to brag about how many songs it has sold, how many songs and TV shows are in its library, and so on. But what it won't talk about is how much revenue is derived from iTunes sales.

The reason it doesn't say how much money it makes off iTunes sales, is because it doesn't make much at all. Take a look at this data summary (it's a PDF file) from Apple's most recently quarterly earnings press release.

In its most recent quarter Apple reported $452 million in revenue from what it describes as "Other music related products and services," which in the footnote it defines as iTunes sales, iPod services, and Apple-branded and third-party accessories, like say, the iPod HiFi, and products like it.

Now here's where it gets interesting. That figure is UP 71% from the same period a year ago but slightly DOWN sequentially from the quarter just before it.

This combined figure amounts to 9.3% of sales. What I and Bernoff, and a lot of other people want to know here, is how much of that is actually derived from sales at the iTunes store? Apple won't say, and it won't say because it doesn't have to. And it doesn't have to because the figure is so small.

Let's say for the sake of argument that Apple takes home 5 cents per iTunes song sold. Then lets say that it sells a billion songs in a year -- way ahead of the volume its really doing. That would equate to $50 million a year.

Does that figure seem to low to you? Then let's double the assumption to 10 cents a song for $100 million a year. Still too low? Let's double it again to 20 cents a song, and reach $200 million a year.

For a company that reported $19.3 billion in sales for its last fiscal year, $200 million, which is probably too high a figure for our hypothetical "billion-song year" is just a tad more than 1% of fiscal 2006 sales. A hypothetical $100 million amounts to about one-half of one percent of sales. Any smaller than that and you end up in rounding-error territory, or as the accountants like to say, "not meaningful."

This is the dirty little secret about the iTunes Store: As good as it is, it makes Apple very little money. It is, for all intents and purposes, a marketing tool for the iPod profit machine. In fiscal 2006 Apple moved 39 million iPods for about $7.7 billion in revenue, and in my estimation about $3 billion and change in gross profit.

TV shows and movies may change that, but not until Apple is selling not merely many millions of downloads per year, but many billions of downloads per year.

Let's go back to the midpoint of my hypothetical scenario and assume Apple takes home a dime a download, and then assume Apple were to sell 10 billion songs in a year: That would equate to a cool $1 billion or about 5% of fiscal 2006 sales. But ten billion songs a year is a lot: That's more than 19,000 songs a minute, or 27.4 million songs per day.--buisnessweek.com

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Is iTunes Dying?

Forrester Group recently presented the results of a 3 months study about digital music sells on Apple’s iTunes, and the conclusions don’t look that good for the Cupertino-based company.

According to the cited statistics, since January this year the number of iTunes transactions made each month has slumped 58 percent, while the average size per purchase has registered a downfall of 17 percent, leading to a 65-percent overall drop in monthly iTunes revenue, U.S. market research group Forrester said in a survey among North American consumers.

Despite the numbers, “it is too soon to tell if this decline was seasonal or if buyers were reaching their saturation level for digital music,” Forrester said in the report that was published to its clients last week, and made available to Reuters on Wednesday.

Apple’s music download service is now dominating the market, following the massive success of the tiny iPod. Apple declared that over 1.5 billion music tracks and tens of millions of TV shows and movies were sold through iTunes since its launch.

The decline indicated by the Forrester analysis comes after a period of strong growth. The number of monthly iTunes transactions grew sevenfold, from just over two transactions per 1,000 households in April 2004, to nearly 17 during January 2006. Over that period, the average transaction size almost doubled, to $6.69 from $3.55.

Revenues generated by iTunes are dominated by a large number of small transactions, with Apple selling just 20 iTunes tracks for every iPod shipped.

Forrester's recent analysis of more than 2,700 US iTunes debit and credit card transactions reveals that 3% of online households made an iTunes purchase in the past year. Apple's iTunes proves that $0.99 micropayments for digital music can lead to substantial revenue; buyers spent an average of $35 at iTunes over the past year.

With half of all transactions costing $3 or less, though, transaction fees threaten to make iTunes unprofitable. Since the introduction of the iTunes Music Store, Apple has been steadily selling just 20 iTunes tracks for each iPod sold, suggesting that even at $0.99, most consumers still aren't sold on the value of digital music.

"Only Apple knows just how much profit there is at the end of the day on a $1.98 credit card transaction for two songs, but with transaction costs, hosting costs, and the wholesale price of the songs, there's not much margin left," Forrester said.

Of all online homes, only 3 percent buy music at Apple's music store, and of those most continue to buy most of their music on compact discs (CDs).

"Although Apple is the dominant leader in the digital music industry, the entire category of digital music made up just 4 percent of U.S. music sales in 2005," Forrester said.

On the other hand, Apple denies any problems with its service, with spokeswoman Natalie Kerris saying that the figure, from research firm Forrester, “is simply incorrect”; sales are up 75 per cent on 2005 and Apple, with six per cent of the market, is now the country's fourth largest music retailer. However, Apple did not disclose any specific details about how much profit iTunes generates.

Other analysts claim that the numbers delivered by Forrester and the overall conclusion that iTunes is dying are wrong.

A Pacific Crest Securities analyst, Steve Lidberg, says that considering the low impact iTunes has on Apple’s overall revenues, even a drop in sales would be insignificant: “noise regarding [an] iTunes slowdown is misleading.”

Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi expects the overall music player market to slow to 22% growth in 2008 from 48% in 2006. “Although the iPod’s market share has been resilient so far, history provides several examples of leading products that lost share despite seemingly strong competitive advantages,” he wrote.

“For example, Sony’s Walkman - the iPod of its day - saw its share decline from 100% to 28% in three years as other large electronics makers entered the portable music market. As another example, in the video game console market, Microsoft’s first-generation Xbox took 20% share largely from market share leader Sony’s Playstation.”

iTunes and the iPod are now facing Microsoft’s new rivals, Zune and Zune Marketplace. Zune MP3 player is also touted as the “iPod-killer”, and according to market research it debuted as No. 2 music gadget in November, after the iPod. Microsoft hopes to sell 1 million Zunes by the end of June, 2007.--playfuls.com

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

New 300 GB Laptop Hard Drive


Fujitsu today announced the MHX2300BT series of mobile hard disk drives featuring impressive storage capacities of 250GB and 300GB, making them the first 2.5" PMR hard disk drives in the industry to attain these high levels of capacity.

PMR, or perpendicular magnetic recording technology, is essential to Fujitsu achieving the increased capacity per platter. PMR technology places the data bits standing on end so that more data can fit onto a disc, allowing for greater storage capacity while reducing corruption factor.

Additional benefits of the Fujitsu second-generation PMR products include best-in-class low power consumption at 1.6W, idle power consumption of 0.5W as well as high shock tolerance and near-silent operation. The 4200 RPM drives have a track to track seek time of 1.5ms.

"Due to our strong focus on innovation, Fujitsu remains at the forefront in promoting advanced technologies such as perpendicular recording and SATA, while at the same time continuing to meet the industry's insatiable demand for high-capacity products," said Joel Hagberg, vice president, marketing and business development, Fujitsu Computer Products of America. "Our commitment to R&D has not only spurred the development of the industry's first 2.5" 300GB capacity perpendicular hard disk drive, but it will allow Fujitsu to continue to achieve these aggressive milestones in advance of the rest of the industry."

Just last March, Fujitsu launched the first 2.5" Serial ATA hard disk drive to feature up to 200GB of storage space. The MHX2300BT series will begin shipping in the first quarter of 2007.--dailytech.com

Friday, December 08, 2006

Apple Possibly Getting into the Games Market

Claims that Apple are looking at the games market are accurate according to Apple Insiders however the problem for Apple is getting access to a processor that can deliver the speed needed for an advanced games console.

12 months ago approched IBM in an attempt to get access to the cell processor now found in the new PS3. This was knocked back because of Sony's investment and part ownership of the processor development program.The Cell processor consists of a general-purpose power PC processor core connected to eight special-purpose DSP cores. These DSP cores, which IBM calls "synergistic processing elements are what make the Cell processor unique. It is this unique capability that Sony is banking on over the next few years to give them a big gaming advantage over the Xbox and the Nintendo Wii.

This week in Sydney the Vice President of Technology for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Paul Holman and I discussed the possibility of Apple entering the games market. "It is possible and we are aware that they have been looking at several oppertunities" he said. "They would need a very good processor like the cell which right now is delivering a lot of power to the PS 3 which developers have discovered has given them a lot of headroom to further develop new gaming capabilities" he4 addeded.

Another Sony Computer Entertainment executive said"We have known for some time of Apple's interest in the games market however it will be tough for them up against Sony and Microsoft and of late Nintendo.We believe that they will come into the games market late in 2007 but not with a pure gaming console. we are told that they are looking at a pretty powerful media centre with a big gaming capability. This is one of the reasons that we are looking at significant firware upgrades between now and then to deliver a better media centre capability via the PS3".

SHN knows that Apple has also held discussions with Intel about thge possibility of getting access to the Xenon triple-core processor that is found in the XBox 360. The design of this processor shares some DNA with the Playstation 3's Cell processor, so it's not surprising that it also embodies many of the same assumptions about the best way to wring performance out of the sorts of extremely large transistor counts that Moore's Curves have given the latest generation of integrated circuits. Like the Cell processor that now powers the Playstation 3, the Xenon carries on the "RISC"-style tradition of trading programmer/compiler effort for hardware. Software writers who develop for Xenon must take on more of the burden of optimizing their code by making it explicitly parallel, and in return they get more execution hardware to play with.

What I am told is that Apple is working on developing a media centre that will allso allow games to be played from the Apple Media Centre console however the problem for Apple is identifying and getting access to the right processor which allows developers to quickly re code existing programs for the potential new Apple media centre. They are also very reluctant to enter the market with a pure gaming console. What they believe is that by introducing gaming as an extension of a media centre will attract a wider audience than gamers.

Prudential analyst Jesse Tortora believes that there is a possibility that Apple will move into the console hardware market. He believes that Apple could combine technology from its existing products to create a home and portable video game console.

"We think the videogame market represents a distinct possibility for Apple, especially considering that it recently announced the availability of videogames for its iPod through its iTunes store," said Tortora.

"The game console device could be morphed out of some combination of the MacMini and iTV, while the handheld player could be developed as an enhancement for a future version of the widescreen iPod," the analyst explained.

Tortora believes that a reason for Apple to make a move into the video game market would be to protect its position in the home entertainment sector - an area Microsoft is attempting to appeal to with its recent roll out of downloadable movies and TV shows on the Xbox 360. Microsoft themselves have also released a rival to the iPod in the Zune.

"There are no technical limitations to this capability, and Microsoft is already aggressively wooing the movie studios," noted the Prudential analyst. "This could adversely impact Apple's iTunes Movie download business longer-term, along with its iTV and video iPod sales."

Should we hear any more murmurings about Apple entering the video games market with its own system, we'll let you know.--smarthouse.com

Monday, December 04, 2006

Another Case of Tech Lessening Privacy


Sometimes this year, Nike and Apple thought at a partnership, for mutual profitability. THEIR profitability, OUR privacy breach.

The popularity of Apple's iPod Nano couldn't stay without effect in the sports area so Nike decided in May it was time to add some fun to regular jogging shoes. This is how the Nike+iPod Sports Kit was born.

Shortly put, a type of sport shoes that, by using some sensors, can transmit to the iPod through wireless connection information on the type of exercising made, the number of kilometers made, the burnt calories and so on. The information can be saved and seen later, but the interoperability works both ways with the iPod offering an adequate musical background for various physical exercising.

Even the famous music download service iTunes included a special section dedicated to Nike Sport Music.

But it seems that listening to music while running is not that safe. Researchers in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington say there are serious privacy breaches posed by the gadget, which is marketed to runners but may be equally attractive to stalkers and thieves.

"It is easy for someone to use the Nike+iPod as a tracking device," says Scott Saponas, a doctoral student in computer science and lead author of a technical report posted online. "It's an example of how new gadgetry can erode our personal privacy."

"A bad person could use this information to compromise your personal privacy and safety. We describe specific example scenarios, like stalking, in our paper," said a statement from researchers Scott Saponas, Jonathan Lester, Carl Hartung and Tadayoshi Kohno of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

The gadget in the runner's shoe contains a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip which sends the data to a receiver connected to the iPod. The information itself is encrypted, but enough information is broadcast to a range of up to 60 feet to pose a security risk.

"When you walk or run the Nike + iPod sensor in your shoe will transmit messages using a wireless radio," said the researchers. "These messages contain a unique identifier that can be detected from 60 feet away. This information is potentially private because it can reveal where you are, even when you'd prefer for a bad person to not know your location."

They found that small computer equipment could be used to read the unique identifier. Some of this was small enough to hide in the user's environment. Placed on that person's front door or in bushes beside the entrance the machine could be used to read and record every time the shoe gadget passed it by.--playfuls.com

Moreover, a computer with wireless Internet access can record multiple users' whereabouts, send the information to a central server and plot people's locations using Google Maps. The computer can then be programmed to communicate with the person doing the tracking, with an e-mail or text message.