NPD: Apple treads water while others sink in jukebox market
Apple may not be enjoying the multiples of growth it once did as its iPod business grew to its current size, but the Cupertino, Calif.-based firm may be the only one seeing growth at all in the current market, The NPD Group
reports.
The overall market for portable players dipped an average of 16 percent year-over-year for the period between November 18th and December 9th, creating disappointment in a business which is used to upswings in the few weeks between American Thanksgiving and Christmas.
NPD assigns blame to a mature market where most customers are already spoken for; there are fewer newcomers and less chances for growth as a result, according to the group's analysts. Apple may also be skewing the market downwards as it expands its retail avenues to challenge previously isolated rivals and switches from expensive hard drive players to les pricey flash models.
MacBook leads Amazon charts into holidays
Last-minute orders for notebook computers from Amazon before Christmas have been been dominated by the mid-range
2.2GHz MacBook, Fortune
claims.
As the morning opened, the white portable was at the top of the rankings and was joined by two additional models, the
2GHz base model at 7th place and the starting
MacBook Pro in 10th.
The ranking is likely helped by ongoing rebates as high as $150, the magazine says in its blog. However, systems from HP and other Windows-based manufacturers have had to drop prices by as much as 27 percent to make the list.
Apple has been a familiar presence at the head of the general electronics category, with the
4GB iPod nano outselling Amazon's own Kindle e-book reader. The
8GB iPod nano,
16GB iPod touch, and the
80GB iPod classic are also currently in the top ten as of press time.
 Apple is developing a volume control device for its iPods that would automatically calculate how long a person has been listening and at what volume, before gradually reducing the sound level, all in an effort to protect users' hearing, according to the London-based Daily Mail. Citing a new patent application, the report--to which Apple declined to comment--says the "device will also calculate the amount of 'quiet time' between when the iPod is turned off and when it is restarted, allowing the volume to be increased again to a safe level." In February 2006, a Louisiana man filed a class action suit against Apple, saying the computer maker failed to take adequate steps to prevent hearing loss among iPod users. That was followed by warnings from politicians and researchers on hearing-loss hazards related to MP3 player use. Apple responded by releasing a free software update for some iPods that lets listeners set a maximum volume limit. But we haven't heard much on the matter since. Let's turn to rocker Pete Townshend for his foreshadowing quote: "I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal components deaf," he said on his Web site two years ago. "Hearing loss is a terrible thing because it cannot be repaired. If you use an iPod or anything like it, or your child uses one, you MAY be OK...But my intuition tells me there is terrible trouble ahead."
Filed under: Hardware  Our friends at jkOnTheRun recently got word from Axiotron that the long fabled ModBook, which you might recall from Macworld 2007 (here is a video we shot of the ModBook, and a gallery), is going to ship on or around January 8th, 2008 a year since it was announced. Since the ModBook has been delayed so much, its specs have changed. It is now running Leopard, the GPS option is standard (formerly $99), and the specs reflect the latest MacBook hardware rev (since the ModBook is basically a MacBook converted into a tablet with a pressure sensative touch screen). All of this starting at $2279.00. Here's hoping that Apple doesn't rev the MacBook at Macworld this year, for Axiotron's sake. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Filed under: Apple, Developer  Let's face it, during the holiday season we all need to take a little break from our families (even though we love them). Why not do something productive when you're squirreled away in that spare bedroom hiding in the bed from your Aunt Dora? Cocoa Dev Central has just updated their great Cocoa tutorial for Leopard. I am just a simple blogger, and I could follow along so I am sure you smart readers out there will be whipping up apps lickety-split. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Filed under: iPhone  Even if iPhones are further into the enterprise market than some might think (or desire), the lack of native non-IMAP support for Exchange accounts on the device has given some users and their IT departments pause. While there are some solid third-party options coming along ( Visto and SyncML among others), only an Apple-blessed solution is going to satisfy in the end. Is there progress on the home front? Chadwick sent along a link via ModMyiPhone.com to an Apple job posting for a QA engineer: The iPhone Quality team is looking for a motivated, highly-technical Exchange test/sync engineer with excellent problem solving and communication skills. You will join a dynamic team responsible for qualifying the latest iPhone products. Your focus will be testing Exchange and Outlook functionality with Apple's innovative new phone. The successful candidate will complete both documented and adhoc testing to ensure high quality releases.
Hiring a QA engineer implies that the Exchange connector code under development is getting ready for testing and release. Could an Exchange hookup for the iPhone be coming in time for Macworld Expo? Dee-lightful.
Thanks, Chadwick. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Filed under: Odds and ends, Internet Tools, iPhone  Christmas is approaching, and what better way to wile away a minute or two than with a virtual snow globe? The kind folks at Pop Art created this iPhone Snow Globe that one 'shakes' by changing the orientation of the iPhone (using this method, perhaps?). It'll amuse you for a moment, and it is free so why not? That's what the holiday season is all about, right? Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Filed under: Accessories, iPhone, Holidays  Anticipating a wave of happy new iPhone owners, AT&T will extend store hours across the US on Boxing Day[1]. The idea is this: After receiving their sparkly new iPhone under the tree, consumers will head over to the AT&T stores to buy unnecessary and overpriced accessories in a post-Christmas wave of spending. TUAW recommends that you accessorize your new iPhone in moderation. The dollar store is a great resource to pick up inexpensive soft cases and socks. [1] December 26. Update: For the literal minded, this is the kind of sock I am talking about: It is marketed as an iPod sock but fits the iPhone as well. Cost: $1 at my local Dollar Tree. It's an excellent value works well in pockets and handbags where keys and other such items threaten the integrity of the iPhone's screen.  Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Filed under: Audio, iTS  ZDNet writes that the Smashing Pumpkins will soon release a 4-song acoustic EP exclusively through iTunes. The EP will be called "American Gothic" and will include "The Rose March", "Pox", "Again, Again, Again (the Crux)", and "Sunkissed". iTunes management apparently approached the band, who agreed to put together this exclusive offering between regular albums. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Filed under: iPhone  An anonymous TUAW reader writes: "How can I email more than one photo at a time from my iPhone?" Unfortunately, the built-in Photos app seems to disallow this. There is a workaround. If you use my SendPics application, you can send many photos at a time. SendPics is a utility I wrote that's meant to bypass the iPhone's scale-for-email behavior and send full resolution images. To make this happen, use SendPics to send an email and then press Home. You'll leave the email program but it will remember the photo you added. Then re-launch SendPics and add another picture and repeat. The downside is this: if you have an email signature, it will repeat for every picture you add--so you may want to edit those out once you've finished composing the email. The anonymous reader reports that he was able to send up to 3 pictures at a time. I had no problem going higher than that but I'm running firmware 1.1.2. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Filed under: iTS, Rumors  After Rhydian Robert's well deserved Leon Jackson's stunning X-Factor victory, customers overwhelmed iTunes' UK servers. After just 36-thousand sales, the servers died and were down for a good 15 hours. Sony BMG insiders were not pleased. The Sun, the occasionally reliable UK news source, writes that Simon Cowell is considering legal action against iTunes over the (according to one insider) " monumental cock up". The single will probably sell several hundred thousand copies by the end of the week through both electronic (like iTunes) and physical channels. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Filed under: Rumors, iPhone Korea Times writes that KFT,with with help from NTT Docomo (which has recently made iPhone news), is still hopeful it will sell the iPhone in South Korea next year. Executive Vice President Kim Yeon-hak says that Steve Jobs has been playing hardball. The South Korean market is small and without a Japanese partnership, Apple may decline to offer the unit in Korea at all. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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 The relative security merits of Mac OS and Windows are not a surprise to military technologists -- back in 1999, the www.army.mil website was moved to Mac OS 9 and Webstar to deter hacker attacks on the previous Windows NT-based servers, and the site remains hosted on Mac OS X and XServes today, still running Webstar (now published by Kerio) rather than the open-source Apache server. Deployments to desktops, however, have not necessarily tracked the back-office adoption of Macs in the military, despite official recognition that there's risk in a one-platform-fits-all approach. Today's Forbes article on Army adoption of the Mac, while partly old news (the original initiative to create a more heterogeneous and secure computing environment dates to 2005), does note that the Army plans to roll out Thursby Software's CAC bundle early next year, to enable full Mac compatibility with Common Access Card security controls. This isn't the first try at a CAC implementation on Mac OS X (Apple's included some of the needed pieces, and the Navy published a thorough PDF guide to getting them working in Tiger) but it promises to be the most comprehensive and well-supported. One new Leopard feature that may well prove essential to Army use of Mac OS X, which went unremarked in the Forbes story: POSIX compliance. Now that Mac OS X really, truly is UNIX, it could begin to replace HP and Solaris deployments in some military roles. Thanks to everyone who sent this in.Permalink | Email this | Comments
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