When compared to OS sales in May 2005 -- the first complete month Mac OS X Tiger was available to customers -- Apple's November 2007 sales of Leopard were 20.5 percent higher, says NPD directing analyst Chris Swenson. This amount does not include copies pre-installed with new Macs but does blend both online and retail figures.
In comparison, Tiger represented a 30 percent increase over the 2003 Panther update, and 100 percent more than the 2002 release of Jaguar.
"It's really stunning to see Apple have one blow-out OS launch after another," Swenson tells AppleInsider. "It's clear that Apple has hit upon the right strategy for rolling out new versions of its OS."
Notably, the climb in dollar volume is disproportionately higher. Income from Leopard climbed by 32.8 percent. Family pack sales accounted for much of this, accounting for almost exactly one third of Leopard sales at 32.8 percent versus only 20.4 percent for the Tiger introduction and boosting the average sales price upwards as a result.
A lack of discounts from third-party stores for the OS helped account for the drop, according to the report.
Although Apple is said to have had inadvertently good timing by launching at the peak of the holiday shopping season and has been helped by a larger number of retail stores, the record has come in spite of the Cupertino, Calif.-based firm stepping down its promotional campaigns for the Leopard debut. A limited-run promotion, dubbed "Free Human With Purchase," helped buyers upgrade their Macs to Tiger with free in-store installation and an hour-long introduction to new features. Leopard's now standard Migration Assistant and the sheer cost of devoting staff to the project likely made it unnecessary, according to Swenson.
The Mac maker may also have determined that such programs are ineffective -- a lesson lost on CompUSA, the analyst observes. While the now in-liquidation retailer was one of Microsoft's most active retail partners for the Windows Vista launch in January and offered help for users upgrading to the new Microsoft package, few customers are believed to have been aware of the option or exercised it. Apple is reportedly under less pressure to do so given the constant presence of its Genius Bar, which provides both consultation and technical help.
"The Apple geniuses are [always] there for you," Swenson notes. "Apple didn't see the need to have 'dedicated free humans' just for the Leopard launch."
 Palm Treo 755p(Credit: Verizon Wireless) Sure, it's been available through Sprint for about eight months now, but hey, if you still want it, Verizon Wireless customers can now finally get their hands on the Palm Treo 755p. It replaces Verizon's aging Palm Treo 700p and aside from a new teal green color, there isn't much difference between the physical characteristics and core features of the Sprint version and the Verizon model. The Palm-based smartphone offers built-in support for Microsoft Direct Push Technology and Exchange ActiveSync; EV-DO; and Bluetooth 1.2. The Treo 755p is currently available online for $299.99 with a two-year contract and after rebates and discounts; in-store availability starts on January 7.
What do energy hogs deserve for the holidays? Earth Aid Kits are a not-so-subtle hint to those who leave the lights on when they leave the room and the faucet on while they brush their teeth.  The customizable packages start at $75 for a dorm room, $80 for an apartment, and $99 for a home. The accompanying Web site offers carbon calculators designed to tally a household's needs and potential resource savings.  Thrown in the dryer, these balls are supposed to help dry clothes faster.(Credit: Earth Aid Enterprises) A family of three would save $460 in energy bills and 7,442 pounds of carbon after using a kit for a year, the company suggests. Depending upon the need of each home, each kit includes a combination of programmable thermostats, smart power strips and timers, fluorescent bulbs, LED night lights, low-flow shower heads, tire pressure gauges, and weather sensors. Recent college graduates launched Earth Aid Enterprises out of Washington, D.C. (Via Sustainablog)
 (Credit: JayBird) JayBird Bear focuses on one thing and one thing only: stereo Bluetooth solutions for portable audio devices. The company debuted this year with three complementing products for music phones, iPods, and other MP3 players. The headliner is the JayBird JB-100, a stereo Bluetooth headset with an ultracompact form factor. This product makes a fine companion for any cell phones using A2DP Bluetooth, or for the small handful of MP3 players with that wireless capability (the Samsung T10 and Insignia Pilot, for example). However, for most other MP3 players--including the iPod--you'll need a little more help with cutting the headphone cord. Enter the JayBird Bluetooth Adapters. The company offers two different $50 models: the JBA-100m offers a standard 3.5mm plug for connecting to any audio device, while the JBA100i comes with a 30-pin connector that allows it to be snapped onto the bottom of any docking iPod. The iPod version is about half the size of the standard MP3 version, so it's quite a bit more compact, but neither one will add a ridiculous amount of bulk.
 (Credit: JayBird) The category of stereo Bluetooth earbuds is still growing, so it's nice to see a newcomer to the market focusing on just that. JayBird debuted in 2007 with the JB-100 headset, a compact stereo earbud set, as well as complementing adapters for the iPod and other audio devices (sold separately). At $129.99, the JB-100 falls comfortably between two close competitors: the Etymotic Ety8 and the Plantronics Voyager 855. This headset has its pitfalls, but if you can get a comfortable fit, it's a worthwhile consideration. Read the JB-100 review.
What do energy hogs deserve for the holidays? Earth Aid Kits are a not-so-subtle hint to those who leave the lights on when they leave the room and the faucet on while they brush their teeth. The customizable packages start at $75 for a dorm room, $80 for an apartment, and $99 for a home. The accompanying Web site offers carbon calculators designed to tally a household's needs and potential resource savings. Thrown in the dryer, these balls are supposed to help dry clothes faster.(Credit: Earth Aid Enterprises) A family of three would save $460 in energy bills and 7,442 pounds of carbon after using a kit for a year, the company suggests. Depending upon the need of each home, each kit includes a combination of programmable thermostats, smart power strips and timers, fluorescent bulbs, LED night lights, low-flow shower heads, tire pressure gauges, and weather sensors. Recent college graduates launched Earth Aid Enterprises out of Washington, D.C. (Via Sustainablog)
 We bet you know someone who does everything online, from banking to making friends, to kicking back. If you're stuck trying to find great gifts for the constant blogger, video vulture, or online socialite in your life, take a look at this virtual gift guide that shows you get it, and you care.
 Rob Gruhl shot this photo with a 12-24mm 'DX' lens geared for small-frame Nikon cameras mounted to a full-frame 'FX' camera, the new D3. The DX lens is designed to shed light only on a small-frame image circle, but the D3 can be set to record on its entire sensor frame. This shot, taken at a focal length of 12mm, shows the portion illuminated with the DX lens.(Credit: Rob Gruhl) Canon beat Nikon to market by years with a high-end digital SLR whose image sensor is the size of a full frame of 35mm film. But while Nikon may have been late to the party with its new D3, I think it employed a much smarter approach to a lens compatibility issue. One of the chief merits of single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras is their ability to accommodate multiple lenses, letting photographers adapt the same camera body to shoot everything from faraway birds to the confined quarters of a small house. It's annoying that one company's lenses generally don't work on another company's camera bodies, but it's even more annoying when a single company's products are incompatible, and the full-frame trend in higher-end cameras has put the spotlight on the issue. Here's the background. The vast majority of digital SLRs sold today use smaller image sensors measuring roughly 24x16mm that are much less expensive to manufacture than full-frame 36x24mm sensors. Canon and Nikon both have made lenses specifically for these smaller sensors; Canon's small-frame lenses bear the EF-S label and Nikon's are called DX. One big reason to make small-frame lenses is that wide-angle lenses need to be reworked for small sensors. For example, you need to use a 10mm lens on a small-frame Canon camera such as an EOS 40D to get the same field of view as a 16mm lens on a full-frame camera model such as an EOS 5D. Another big reason is that lenses for smaller sensors can be made smaller and lighter. For many folks with digital SLRs, having a separate line of lenses for small-frame cameras isn't a big deal. They'll buy a lower-end, small-frame camera, and if they buy a later model, there's a good chance it'll be another small-frame model and their lenses will work fine. But for photographers upgrading to a full-frame camera, the lens compatibility issue rears its ugly head. Canon shooters can't use small-frame EF-S lenses on full-frame cameras. Full-frame cameras physically can only accommodate EF lenses. Nikon, though, permits its small-frame DX lenses to be mounted on its full-frame FX cameras. Nikon's approach isn't all smooth sailing. DX lenses are designed to shine light only a small sensor, so by default, a full-frame camera will use only the central portion of the larger sensor, meaning that many pixels are wasted. On the 12.1-megapixel D3, you only get a 5.1 megapixel image. And if you do enable the full sensor to work, in many situations light will only fall on the central pixels anyway, leaving a clear record of the lens' smaller image circle. (The DX-on-FX photo by D3 owner Rob Gruhl above illustrates the effect.)  Nikon's strategy meant that lens compatibility is a bigger issue for professional-level photographers. Its first full-frame camera, the $5,000 D3, has only just hit the market in recent weeks. That means pro-level photographers who wanted to go digital had to invest in small-frame lenses for earlier pro-level SLR such as Nikon's D2Xs. Perhaps from this point forward, a new D3 owner will only buy full-frame lenses, but many already have invested in expensive lenses. In addition to the relatively inexpensive "kit" lenses that ship with lower-end SLRs, Nikon DX models include a $900 12-24mm f/4 wide-angle zoom, a $1,200 17-55mm f/2.8, a $600 10.5mm f/2.8mm fisheye, and a $700 image-stabilized 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 super-zoom that's the company's best-selling lens ever. Canon, on the other hand, introduced full-frame cameras many years earlier--2002 with the EOS-1Ds--meaning pros weren't as far along in their transition from film to digital and hadn't necessarily invested in a lot of EF-S lenses.
Filed under: OS, Mac 101  We're all faced with the problem of e-mailing large files. This task can be made simple by using Mac OS X's built-in "Compress" tool. This feature makes it easy to not only compress one file into a ZIP archive, but also multiple files or entire folders. Just select the files you need to ZIP and right-click on one of them. When you select Compress, then in a couple seconds (this will take longer depending on the file size) you will be presented with a nice ZIP archive containing all of your files in it. Just drag the ZIP file into your e-mail and send! There are alternatives, such as StuffIt Expander Deluxe, but if all you are doing is compressing files, there really is no need to spend money since Mac OS X will zip and un-zip the archive handily. | Email this | Comments
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Filed under: Hardware, Software, Freeware, Widget Watch  I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan of widgets -- I like the concept just fine, I just don't really have much use for most of the functions. One big exception is iSlayer's iStat Pro. For the uninitiated, iStat Pro is a system-monitoring widget that shows you information about your CPU, RAM and Network activity, the temperature and fan speed of your Mac, what processes are running, how long your system has been up, information about your battery and how many times it has been "cycled" (meaning depleted/fully charged), the list goes on. Today iSlayer released iStat Pro 4.5 which not only updated the UI and some of the standard features, but added some new features as well. From iSlayer's blog:
- Updated network section with new details & controls for PPP/PPPoE connections
- Improved PPC temperature and fan support
- Improved Intel temperature support
- Improved S.M.A.R.T. drive temperature monitoring
- Fixed bugs with battery section and 10.5
- Clicking on a disc icon will now open the drive in finder
- New keyboard shortcuts ("g" - Update external IP, 1-8 - Change skin color)
- Added button to launch Activity Monitor
- Other various bug fixes
- Various UI tweaks
I particularly like the addition of the Activity Monitor launcher and the ability to launch a drive in Finder by clicking on its name. iSlayer Pro 4.5 is available for Intel and PPC Macs running Tiger or Leopard and is donationware. | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Available immediately as a download for the latest client version of Leopard (35.6MB) as well as Tiger in its PowerPC (15.9MB) and Universal (27.4MB) forms, the update primarily addresses holes in the web plug-ins for Adobe's Flash and Shockwave formats as well as web-oriented code, including Perl, Python, and Ruby.
The CUPS printing service, Safari, and Samba (SMB) networking are also key focuses of the update, Apple says. Essential OS components such as Core Foundation and Launch Services have been upgraded for all versions of Mac OS X receiving the patch.
Additional fixes are included depending on the operating system in question. Leopard receives a security upgrade to the Quick Look feature in its version of Finder, while Tiger sees fixes to Address Book, ColorSync, iChat, Mail, and Spotlight.
Mac OS X Server is not yet included in the list of software requiring the update. |
In a brief research note to client investors on Monday, American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu said he's frequently asked about the lack of a 3G iPhone and what it means for Apple. He explained, however, that he sees these ongoing concerns as "overdone and misplaced" at present, and outlined four key data points in defense of his beliefs.
First and foremost, Wu said, 3G (WCDMA/UMTS/HSPA) is still a relatively niche technology and not widely deployed in the US despite all the publicity and hype. "Even in Europe and Japan, where the technology is more available, network coverage is somewhat spotty," he wrote. "While there are a decent number of 3G phones (~10-15 percent) being shipped, the untold reality is they utilize much more prevalent 2/2.5G wireless infrastructure most of the time.
In addition, 3G is not as field tested as 2/2.5G, the analyst said, also pointing out that RIMM -- the leading smart phone vendor -- has experienced a lot of success with 2/2.5G Blackberries.
Costs of 3G iPhone parts would also be somewhat steep at present, Wu added. "We estimate that 3G components including the baseband, RF transceiver, and power amplifier add about $15 in incremental cost versus the 2.5G EDGE chip set iPhone uses today," he told clients. "We believe these price points need to come down a bit before 3G can be widely deployed."
Another reason Apple has been slow to adopt 3G has a lot to do with the technology's reputation for being a bit of a battery hog. "Our sources indicate that 3G requires about 35-40 percent more power to run [than 2/2.5G components]," the analyst wrote in his report. "This is a key issue as Apple seeks to deliver as much battery life as possible on its highly functional iPhone."
From his supply chain checks, Wu believes a 3G iPhone will most likely ship sometime near or after the middle of 2008. "
We believe by then, the network coverage, price points, and battery life issues will be better addressed," he wrote. "Should Apple decide to ship earlier, it will likely be positioned as a high-end smart phone and allow Apple to re-position the current 2.5G iPhone as a more mainstream product."
While Wu and his team remain concerned with potential softness in US consumer spending, he said it appears that Apple "is once again positioned to buck the trend." He recommends that clients be buyers of the company's shares on pull-backs and said he see upside to his $210 price target in 6-12 months. |
It's download time again for Mac OS X users, as 31 new security-related fixes for both Tiger and Leopard were made available by Apple Monday afternoon. The security patches are mostly geared for users of Mac OS X 10.4, known as Tiger, but there's a bunch as well for version 10.5, known as Leopard. They should be automatically pushed to Mac users through the Software Update function, but you can also go to Apple's Web site and download the patches. A number of serious vulnerabilities, such as ones that could lead to a malicious attack on your system, are fixed with the latest update. This includes several flaws that could lead to a remote attacker executing malicious code on a Mac in programs like Address Book, the Safari browser's RSS feed, and CUPS (common Unix printing system), among other things. Apple updated QuickTime last week in order to fix an important flaw in that program. As part of Monday's patches, Apple also shipped a patch for Windows users of Safari that was addressed for Mac users as part of the larger series of patches.
Now in its 19th season, The Simpsons is definitely past its prime. But every once in a while, the show will send me into hysterics. Last night, after Homer's sisters-in-law (and nemeses) Patty and Selma pushed him from a bridge, the past 39 years of Homer's life flash before his eyes. I recognized it right away as a very sharp parody of a popular YouTube video posted last year where Noah Kalima took a picture of himself every day for six years. As homer ages, gains weight, and loses his hair you'll see the various events of his life. His anarchist mother Mona leaves him and his father, he racks up bad grades in school, he goes through puberty (complete with loads of pimples) and he joins the Kiss Army. And this all happens while the same Philip Glass-style minimalist piano music that was in Kalima's video plays in the background. It even ends with a simulated YouTube screen. Sheer brilliance, and a nod to Kalima. You know you've arrived when The Simpsons takes a shot at you.
 A few weeks ago, Net Applications showed that iPhone was much stronger than anyone could have expected in terms of browsing market share. This week, Canalys showed that iPhone sales have surpassed Windows Mobile in North America. RoughlyDrafted did a lot of legwork on the numbers but the short of it is that iPhone is working Windows Mobile.
Can these numbers actually be right? Is iPhone really outselling Windows Mobile phones? Just as a comparison, Windows Mobile was selling well over 3 million devices/quarter globally at the begining of 2007. If all these numbers are right, Apple is not going to have any problem reaching 10 million iPhones. 
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Filed under: OS, Leopard  It should be clear by now that I love Leopard's Quick Look, particularly because of the modular way that Apple designed it so that it can be expanded and extended by third parties. And those third parties are responding! To keep track of all these plugins two interesting new sites have sprung up, QuickLook Plugins List and QLPlugins. Each site has some good stuff not on the other so it's worth keeping an eye on both. Highlights include a neat trick for expanding video format support to mkv (Matroska video) files (and in principle others) and a plugin for Flash FLV files. (Both of these require Perian.)
In the years to come I suspect we're going to look back and wonder how we ever got along without Quick Look.
Thanks to everyone who sent these in!Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Filed under: OS, Software, Software Update, Apple  If you've been wondering when we'd see a security update for Mac OS X Leopard: you can stop holding your breath. Apple has just pushed out Security 2007-009 for Mac OS X 10.5.1. So what's been fixed? According to the release notes: - Core Foundation
- Flash Player Plug-in
- Quick Look
- Safari
- Shockwave Plug-in
- and plenty more
The update, which as ever is recommended for everyone running the latest big cat, weighs in at 35.6MB. If you're wanting to go ahead and install the update without waiting, you'll want to run over to the Apple Support site and grab the file, or simply run Software Update on your system. As with all OS X updates, we'd strongly suggest you have a working backup before installing on any mission-critical system. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Filed under: Humor, Multimedia, Software, iPhone  Just last night we were chatting about ringtones on the Talkcast, and I mentioned that I was so happy with my iPhone that I hadn't taken steps to change either the ringtone or the wallpaper yet-- that Xylophone ringtone is probably the best ringtone I've ever heard. Until now, anyway. Matt Devost used that GarageBand tip posted by Apple to turn none other than the CTU ringtone from tv series 24 into an easy-to-install, completely (mostly-- who owns this ringtone? did Fox make it up?) legit iPhone ringtone. Yes, you too can have your iPhone sound just like the phones at Jack Bauer's place of employment. And this also illustrates just how easy it is to make these things now. Matt says he just put this together in GarageBand, and then followed Apple's doc, and all I did was drag it from my Desktop into my iTunes ringtones folder. Super simple. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I hear my phone ringing. Must be the President wanting to know how the hostage situation is going. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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 Three new games with questionable box art grace your Wii this week. * CYBERNATOR (1993, SUPER NINTENDO, 800 WII POINTS)--Finally, a sci-fi game that addresses the dwindling fossil fuels issue! Cybernator takes place in the distant future where you must clear seven challenging stages. However, you may not solve the world's energy problems. * ALIEN STORM (1991, SEGA GENESIS, 800 WII POINTS)--What is a Wii virtual console release without a side-scrolling action game? Alien Storm has you take on eight stages and more bosses than what the arcade original offered. * MONSTER LAIR (1989, TURBOGRAFX16, 800 WII POINTS)--Monster Lair is a side-scrolling shooter that takes you through 14 rounds of nonstop comical action and is the third game in the Wonder Boy series.
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