News for Saturday, 23 June 2007

As we reported at the beginning of the week, the first Apple Shop was opened this week on France in the leading consumer electronics shop FNAC. As mentioned one of our readers, Mathis, a similar Apple Shop was inaugurated couple of weeks ago in Hamburg (Germany) in Saturn's shop and a UK reader sent us the link of Apple UK website indicating the location of such Apple-dedicated places in PC World shopshttp://www.apple.com/uk/buy/shop/.
This Apple Shop concept is present in those three European countries as well as in USA and Japan. IT strengthens Apple position in consumer electronics shops without requiring Apple to massively invest in numerous physical Apple Stores.
It remains unclear if the Apple Shop concept will replace the physical Apple Store strategy, as it is probably more cost-effective for Cupertino to get its products demonstrated in a dedicated environment inside a consumer electronics shop draining a much larger number of visitors.

Couple of months ago, our Server Master, w00kie installed analysis tools developed by Google and known as Google Analytics. When studying the data and going into details, one can learn interesting information. When dissecting data from our readers using Mac hardware, we identified Intel-based Mac visitors being more prevalent then PPC-based Mac visitors (51% vs. 49%). Taking into account that the first Intel-based Mac was released about 18 months ago, it clearly illustrates the success of MacIntel hardware models.
When looking at the browser usage, Safari is first (63%) followed by FireFox (11% on Mac + 11% on PC), then Internet Explorer (7% on PC), and Camino (2% on Mac).
We will follow those data in order to evaluate how Safari 3 on PC is being adopted by our PC visitors.

Apple released Security Update 2007-006:

Security Update 2007-006 is recommended for all users and improves the security of the following component:
WebKit
Security Update 2007-006 (Universal) SHA-1 Digest:
SecUpd2007-006Univ.dmg=
68fe035d8653de6e4d27da92d4dbf77c53c1f214
For explanation of what a SHA-1 digest is, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n75510
For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798

One week before the launch of the iPhone, Apple released a virtual guided tour to demonstrate and illustrate features and functions, the video can be either streamed or downloaded (175MB).
Apple website was refreshed and the iPhone gets its one "tab" as the "iPod+iTunes" or the "Mac", so far only on Apple US website.
Apple release an update for Safari 3 (version 3.0.2b), available from the software update panel or from the dedicated Apple US webpage

Changes in Safari 3.0.2 for Windows beta:
- Latest security updates
- Improved stability
- Fixes for text display, non-English systems, and start-up times
Changes in Safari 3.0.2 for Mac OS X beta:
-Latest security updates
-Improved stability
-Improved WebKit support for Mail, iChat and Dashboard

This update is available for both OS X and Windows versions of Safari 3.