Apple owns up to a Snow Leopard bug
Photo: Apple Inc.
[UPDATE: On Monday, Nov. 10, nearly a month later, Apple released Mac OS X 10.6.2, an extensive update that fixed the guest-account bug and more than three dozen other Snow Leopard problems. For a full list, see here.]
Call it fallout from the Sidekick fiasco.
Having watched Microsoft (MSFT) go through a weekend from hell for wiping out the personal data of thousands of T-Mobile (DT) customers, Apple (AAPL) finally acknowledged a data-swallowing bug that Snow Leopard users have been complaining about since September.
"We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix," an Apple spokesperson told CNET's Erica Ogg on Monday.
According to several hundred messages on Apple's discussion boards, the Snow Leopard problem is triggered when users log in and out of an old Leopard guest account and then try to log back in to their regular account. One victim described the effect as follows:
"Not only did Snow Leopard wipe out ALL of my documents, my email accounts, my address book, it broke the dynamic spell checker in yahoo messenger, caused random problems with Safari, InDesign, and others, caused lockups, spinning beach balls, loud fans… and it was just getting worse. I am restoring Leopard (sans snow) as I write this." (link)
The Sidekick disaster is of a different magnitude — which may be why Apple is willing to have the two discussed in the same news cycle. More
The man who put the 'i' in iMac
Meet the creative director who named a generation of Apple products
Photo: Apple
The TBWA\Chiat\Day creative team was horrified in 1998 when Steve Jobs pulled back a cloth and revealed the bulbous teardrop that came to be known as the Bondi-Blue iMac.
But then Jobs wasn't so crazy at first about the name they proposed for it.
No one had ever seen anything like the new computer, veteran creative director Ken Segall tells Cult of Mac's Leander Kahney in an exclusive interview published Tuesday evening.
"We were pretty shocked but we couldn’t be frank," Segall recalls. "We were guarded. We were being polite, but we were really thinking, 'Jesus, do they know what they are doing?' It was so radical."
Segall eventually came up with "iMac," a name that connected the original 1984 Macintosh with the rapidly expanding Internet. But Jobs took some convincing.
Below the fold, excerpts from the story as Kahney tells it:
33% of U.S. touchscreens are iPhones
Touchscreen phones are on fire, comScore reports, and Apple is leading the pack. For now.
Three months ending Aug. 2009. Source: comScore MobiLens
There's a thundering herd of imitators behind it, but Apple's (AAPL) iPhone still dominates that fastest-growing segment of the U.S. smartphone market, according to a comScore report issued Tuesday.
Touchscreen mobile phone adoption in the U.S. grew at a breakneck 159% rate last year, comScore reports, easily outpacing the 63% growth of the broader smartphone market.
By last August, nearly 34 million Americans were carrying smartphones, 23.8 million of them touchscreen devices. And of those touchscreen phones, 32.9% were iPhones.
“The iPhone clearly set the trend in the industry for touchscreen devices, so it’s no surprise that it has the largest share of the market,” said comScore VP Mark Donovan. “But as other players have entered the touchscreen market with compelling devices, competition is clearly heating up.”
Donovan mentioned Google's (GOOG) Android platform in particular, although the closest Android contender in August was the T-Mobile (DT) G1 running a distant seventh after two proprietary LG phones, the BlackBerry (RIMM) Storm, the Palm (PALM) Pre and the Samsung Instinct.
Below the fold, comScore's spreadsheets, including one that shows preference by age group. (The smartphone sweet spot seems to be ages 24 to 34.)
The iPhone dons a suit and tie
IT departments are finally starting to buy Apple's smartphone, says a Deutsche Bank report
Click to enlarge. Source: Deutsche Bank
"There is growing evidence that the iPhone is making inroads into the Enterprise," writes Deutsche Bank research analyst Chris Whitmore in a report to clients Monday.
According to his estimates, Apple (AAPL) by the end of the year will have shipped about 2 million iPhones into corporate accounts through various routes, including internal IT department purchases and formal reimbursement policies.
That would give Apple about a 7% share of the enterprise smartphone market this year, up from 2% in 2008.
IT departments were famously resistant to the iPhone when it was launched two years ago. That resistance has begun to melt, writes Whitmore, for several reasons:
Apple's 2009 ad budget: Half a billion
Those Get-a-Mac spots aren't cheap, but they deliver a lot of bang for the buck
Photo: Apple Inc..
Apple (AAPL) shells out a ton of money for advertising. In fiscal 2009 it spent $501 million, according to the 10-K form filed Tuesday. That's up from $486 million in 2008 and $467 million in 2007.
But half a billion doesn't seem like so much when it's compared with the $1.4 billion Microsoft (MSFT) spent in fiscal 2009, or the $811 million Dell (DELL) spent on ads I can't remember ever seeing.
In fact, as a percentage of revenue, Apple has actually been decreasing its ad spending every year for the past eight, from nearly 5% in 2001 to 1.37% today (1.17% if you use non-GAAP revenue). That's less than half the 3.6% of revenue Research in Motion (RIMM) spends advertising BlackBerries. (See chart below.)
Most recent fiscal year. Source: Company reports
Yet even if you despise Apple and never use their products, you tend to remember their ads. How does Apple get so much bang from its marketing buck?
I can think of five reasons: More
iPhone in "striking distance" of BlackBerry
Apple gains, RIM drifts, Palm holds steady in the latest ChangeWave survey
Source: ChangeWave
Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry, with a 40% share, is still the most popular smartphone among the 4,255 owners who responded to a ChangeWave survey in September. But Apple's (AAPL) iPhone is gaining fast, according to research director Paul Carton.
"Apple (30%) has seen a huge market share jump since the previous survey," he writes in a release issued Tuesday. "Not only has the iPhone 3GS release enabled them to gain 5-pts overall — for the first time it has also placed them within striking distance of the number one spot in the consumer market."
Palm (PALM) remains far behind at 7%, Carton notes, but adds that "this is the first survey in nearly two years where their share hasn’t fallen – and that’s a clearly encouraging sign."
ChangeWave surveys are often dismissed as unrepresentative — which they are. But in this case, the so-called ChangeWave Alliances' 20,000 professionals "who spend their everyday lives on the frontline of technological change," according to its website, represent the sweet spot of RIM's and Palm's target market.
For more results — good and bad — from the survey, see the charts below the fold.
J.D. Power: iPhone is No. 1, again
Consumers and business users alike prefer it over the BlackBerry
Photo: J.D. Power
Here's a bullet point you can expect to see at Steve Jobs' next keynote.
Apple's (AAPL) iPhone has once again come in first in J.D. Power's semi-annual customer satisfaction study, despite a battery that continues to disappoint.
Apple increased its score in both the consumer and business user portions of the survey.
Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry was No. 2 among business users and No. 3, after Apple and LG, among consumers.
More broadly, the survey found:
AdMob: iPhone's share of the smartphone market hits a record 40%
Source: AdMob
Apple (AAPL) now has a substantial — if not the largest — share of the smartphone market in every region of the world except Asia and Africa, according to a report issued Wednesday by AdMob.
Overall, the iPhone's worldwide share grew to 40% from 33% over the last six months. In North America, its share of the smartphone market is 52%, as measured by hits on AdMob's ads.
AdMob, which bills itself as the world's largest mobile advertising marketplace, delivers ads displayed on smartphone screens, so its statistics tends to favor phones heavily used for Web surfing. "AdMob does not claim that this information will be necessarily representative of the mobile Web as a whole or of any particular country market," it warns at the bottom of the report. "AdMob’s traffic is driven by publisher relationships and may be influenced accordingly."
Among the report's other findings: More
Brand values: Apple +12%, Dell -12%, Microsoft -4%
Apple (AAPL) is up, as are Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and to a lesser extent Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry.
Microsoft (MSFT), Dell (DELL) and Yahoo (YHOO) are down.
Such are the high-tech highlights of the 2009 edition of Interbrand's annual listing of the top 100 "best global brands."
Google (up 25%) is the big winner, followed closely by Amazon (up 22%). Dell (down 12%) was the biggest loser.
Apple, whose name is now valued by Interbrand at $15.443 billion, up $1.6 billion (12%) from last year, jumped four places to break into the top 20 for the first time.
"The recession won’t take a bite out of this Apple," wrote Interbrand, employing a metaphor that's not exactly brand new. "Declining Mac sales and fears for the company’s future without brand visionary Steve Jobs, were outweighed by record high iPod sales, doubling sales for the iPod Touch, and all-time high market share for Mac OS software. Price might be a barrier for cost-conscious consumers, but Apple responded quickly with high margin, low-priced products like the US $99 iPhone and a new, voice-activated iPod Shuffle."
Below the fold: The tech results in bar graph form.
Bulls vs. Bears: Re-analyzing Apple
Apple's (AAPL) "It's only rock and roll" event Wednesday triggered a flurry of fresh reports from analysts who track the stock, including Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, Caris's Robert Cihra, Needham's Charlie Wolf and RBC's Mike Abramsky. (See AppleInsider for a concise summary of their generally positive remarks.)
But we were particularly taken by the report issued Thursday morning by Brian Marshall, who took over the Apple beat at Broadpoint AmTech when Shaw Wu left for Kaufman Bros.
Borrowing a device Wu liked to use — and one that reflects the way investors talk about Apple on the financial boards — Marshall set it up as a debate between the Apple bulls and the Apple bears:
