News for Thursday, 14 December 2006

Last week, Forrester Research was reporting results of a analysis of online music download business over a 27-month period. They concluded that prediction for 2006 are far from encouraging, if all online music shops are affected by revenue reduction. They reported that iTS sales would have drop by 58% for S& 2006.
Couple of days later, analysts from Piper Jaffray released their own study about iTS, ending up with dramatically different results:

"From Jan. to Sept. in 2005 Apple sold 10.4m songs/week and in 2006 that number was up 78 percent to 18.5m songs/week,"

Not sure they are looking at the same numbers or get access to the same data. It also shows that many analysts are suddenly becoming specialist for analyzing Apple's business when it is time for some juicy operations on the NYSE.
Current rumors or expectations reported by analysts around the supposed to be released iPhone is another example of this buzz built on hypothesis. The iPhone will be released in 2007, the date remains to be defined, I guess only Steve really knows it.

OSX's software update now offers an Airport update:

AirPort Update 2006-002 improves AirPort compatibility in the following computers:
- MacBook Pro (15-inch Core 2 Duo)
- MacBook Pro (17-inch Core 2 Duo)
- MacBook (13-inch Core 2 Duo)

Two comments: that's probably one of the shortest update description ever done (except SONY's PS3 firmware updates which have basically NO description whatsoever except for the revision number). Hopeful owners of Intel iMacs and Mac Pros will have to wait for a fix to their Airport connexions problems, as this update does nothing for them.

Yesterday we reported on the new security updates for Mac Office X and 2004, which download link was 404, then which were completely pulled form the M$ website...
According to Microsoft's MSDN Technet blog, this update was still in beta stage and wasn't supposed to be released. It was all a terrible mistake, you see.
Some (lucky?) people who managed to grab it and installed it report (MacFixit) that it has a number of bugs. For exemple, Entourage will crash everytime you try to connect to an Exchange server over SSL.
The best? The aforementioned blog post advises you to:

We recommend that anyone who may have installed these pre-release updates to uninstall [sic] them.

Yeah really? How???

Well, looks like price fixing is a recurrent habit amongst big companies [in France, the three major cellphone network companies have recently been fined a hefty €300 million for price fixing], and that LCD manufacturers don't want to be left behind. Japanese, US and Korean authorities have started investigations on Samsung, Sharp, NEC, LG Philips and some other LCD makers. They are thought to have had talks to artificially maintain high prices on their respective products, when competition should have driven the prices down.
In any case, it ill probably take years for anything to happen... So don't expect the price of LCD TVs and monitors to plummet anytime soon ;-)