Apple enjoyed its most profitable quarter ever, as the company set sales marks for both Mac and iPhone sales. The company announced earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter on Monday. For the quarter ending September 30, Apple reported a net profit of $1.67 billion, or $1.82 per share, on revenue of $7.9 billion. Those numbers blew away analysts’ earnings and revenue estimates of $1.42 a share and $9.2 billion in sales, respectively. Mac sales floated 17% over the year-ago quarter to 3.1 million units, setting a new quarterly record. While Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones this quarter, realizing a 7% unit growth over the same quarter last year. Continue reading…
A new Apple iMac has been spotted in the wild, sporting a thinner body and ramped-up specs – and a rumoured Blu-ray drive.
The chaps over at AppleInsider have reported that the new iMac dual-core all-in-ones have been in production for two weeks, so we can expect a launch announcement very soon. Continue reading…
So the Apple Mac tablet has more or less been confirmed by Jobs, and the rumours are still coming thick and fast – the latest that we can expect 13- and 15-inch models alongside the 10-inch tablet we’ve heard so much about. Gizmodo got the news from a source, who it says has always been “100% reliable”, that the two other sized touchscreen prototypes had been spotted in a factory in China. Continue reading…
Steve Jobs’ legendary eye for detail has led to two Apple Mac Tablet designsbeing scrapped. According to the Wall Street Journal, Jobs just wasn’t happy with the finalised versions and shelved them. The first Apple Mac Tablet was binned because of poor battery life while the second attempt was killed due to a lack of memory. Continue reading…
OS X continues to fall short of its security reputation
Many Mac owners live under the assumption that their computers will never be attacked. While that statement may hold some truth — most fail to understand why. Rather than realizing that the relatively safety is afforded by Apple’s still small market share, they believe that the security is somehow owing to an inherent security superiority in their operating system of choice, OS X, a sentiment echoed in Apple’s sarcasm-laden “Get a Mac” commercials. Continue reading…
Apple’s iLife series is a bundle of image and video viewing and editing software, music player and a host of other multimedia and fun applications that Apple likes to call “Lifestyle utilities”. Whichever way you look at it, there’s a fair bit of additions and tweaks since iLife ‘08.
iPhoto – Apple’s answer to anything related to imaging has been spruced up with a couple of new features – Faces and Places. Besides this, the interface is a less cluttered as compared to earlier versions. Faces uses face-recognition algorithms to identify people. Once you name a face that has been identified, Faces can scan through other photos and identify those with that person and suggests a name to all the faces that match. Places is a geotagging application that allows tagging of photos. Places can either automatically tag the photos by looking up the GPS coordinates of the photo and place it on a map, or manually where you have to add a location to each photo. This is done by entering the name of the nearest city. Places has a slightly confusing interface.
iPhoto has a few nifty new image editing options. For one, the saturation slider can preserve skin tones – obviously very useful and sorely missed in iLife ‘08. The retouching brush will not dull edges anymore, useful for highlighting and subtly merging as required. There is a Definition tool that can be used to highlight edges. Some of the new features seem like they’ve been borrowed from Aperture, Apple’s image editing software.
Apple iLife '09
GarageBand is has also seen major overhaul. Gone is the podcast-heavy interface and the focus is once again on instruments and music. Lessons is a nifty not to mention useful addition for budding musicians that teaches the basics of guitaring and the piano. The interface is cleanly laid out with the instructor occupying the top half of the screen and the piano keyboard/guitar fretboard occupying the bottom and you can learn the guitar and the piano. The Lessons themselves consist of a brief introduction followed by a demonstration from the on-screen teacher and after that you get to practice the piece. You can loop the piece if you need more practice. Once done, you can play along with the instructor. There are more advanced lessons available for a small fee from Lessons Store. Continue reading…
