Tuhel

Back to the Mac Event but first lets crunch some numbers…

Apple filed its fourth quarter results on Monday 18th October with its highest revenue and earnings ever for Apple Computer. Record sales of Apple Macs, iPhones and iPad’s and the company posted record revenue of $20.34 billion and net quarterly profit of $4.31 billion.

Apple sold 3.89 million Macs during the quarter, a 27 percent unit increase over the year ago quarter. The Company also sold 14.1 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 91 percent unit growth over the last year ago quarter, 9.05 million iPods during the quarter, representing an 11 percent unit decline from a year ago quarter. And lastly 4.19 million iPads during the quarter, which was below analyst expectations of 4.8 million, its not a bad result at all, don’t get me wrong, these are still humongous sales figures in this credit crunch economical condition. I am certain most large institutions would be over the moon with these results.

Now Back to the Mac Event

As always it’s great looking forward to the Apple Mac events presented by Steve Jobs. This event was all about the showing off of the new Mac OS Lion operating system, which is due for release in summer 2011.

Some big sales figures were released by Apple, as in One in 20 PC sold in retail in US is a Macintosh” and Macs made 33 percent of the revenue last year. About 13.7 million Macs where sold in financial year 2010, that is 5x more than 2005. Apple is growing 2.5x’s the market and has captured 20.7% of the US consumer market. This is largely thanks to the Apple Retail, with 318 store in 11 countries as quoted by apple “this didn’t just start happening. Last quarter the Mac grew 2.5x. It’s outgrown the market for 18 quarters in a row.”

The main highlights of the event included Facetime for Mac and the new MacBook Air, which is full unibody, and comes in two sizes, 13.3 and 11.6 inches, a high-res LED display with more pixels than Macbook Pro 15 inch, that’s 1440 X 900pixels to you and me.

The new Macbook Air will have No Optical Drive and No Hard Drive either. Apple is moving to flash storage as its instant, faster and 90% smaller and lighter. Leaving out the drive’s means it will be completely silent, more robust and reliable.

Apple Changes the future of Laptops

By leaving out the hard drive and the optical drives out of MacBook Air, Apple computer is creating a much faster, slimmer, robust and less power hungry range of laptops ready for Apple’s Cloud computing platform. I believe this is a fundamental change in the way future laptops will be made, moving away from local storage and relying more on cloud computing data storage centres, as reported by ReadWriteWeb about Apple’s huge new data centre in Maiden, North Carolina and ReadWriteWeb believe “The data center is considered a major part of Apple’s cloud computing roll out”. Businesses as well as the home users will benefit from hosting their full set of applications, operating systems and doing away with having to worry about Anti Viruses updates, system and software updates by utilising the power of the cloud computing platform. The lack of mass local storage and the lack of ability to burn stuff onto CDs or DVDs will mean a shift in the way storage media is used in the future. I don’t want to comment too much on this, but I do believe this to be the direction Apple will move its future range of computer and devices.

The MacBook air will survive on 7 hours of battery life on wireless web and 30 days standby, a full size Multi-Touch trackpad, really stunning design at 0.68 inch thin and at the narrowed point it is 0.11 inch and weighs just 2.9 lbs. It is going to cost £849 for 11.6 model, the more pricier 13.3 inch top end model will cost £1,349 and both models of the Macbook Air are available right now.

Apple also showed off the new iLife 11 application package, with new Facebook enhancements, full screen mode, new slideshows and book designs. A range of improvements include better audio editing and a new feature of the ability to construct movie trailers without much effort, you can now share straight to YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo.

Mac OS Lion due for release summer 2011, the main features as shown so far in Mac OS Lion will be:
Multitouch gestures
App Store for Mac
App Home Screens
Full Screen Apps
Auto Save
Apps resume when launched
One click downloads
Automatic installation and automatic app updates

Four cool new inventions
Expose
Full Screen Apps
Dashboard
Spaces
And it’s going to be called Mission Control and Navigate the Mac.

For the coming festival season and for any other event the new MacBook Air should be on top of the list for anyone looking for a high tech future proof well designed light weight machine, I know what I want for my next present…