News for Friday, 27 February 2009

During the investor conference, Steve Ballmer tried to minimize the increase of Mac market share and the success of Apple products. According to his data, the main competitor for Windows is Windows, the pirated version available on the P2P network.
He minimized the increase of Mac market shares by "by a point or more", not a dramatically increase according to him. Such statement is a bit striking when one looks at the past six months, the number of Mac units sold and the figures from independent analysts clearly demonstrating the increase of Mac in use on the internet.
So, it needs some explanation. Steve Ballmer decided to look and speak at the worldwide data and over the 300 millions computers sold in 2008, among them about 10 millions were Macs, demonstrating a clear increase but with figures lower than those published. Indeed, Apple Mac market share dramatically increased in USA, with figures much more impressive than the worldwide ones. So, if Apple and Microsoft are speaking about the same figures, they are not looking at them from the same angle. So, Steve Ballmer did not lie, he just presented the data in a more global vision that was more satisfying for Windows. It also gave his the opportunity to avoid recognizing that Vista was a major failure for Microsoft and the real soil given to Linux and Mac OS X to quickly grow on it. Steve Ballmer expects Windows 7, IE 8+ and emerging market consumer PC to drive Microsoft growth of the coming months.

According to rumor sites, Apple sent a new version of Mac OS X 10.5 to developers and testers and it should be release as Mac OS X 10.5.7 if no major bugs are reported. It should fix numerous conflicts and improve synchronization and network functions. It should also improve RAW files management.
This new version of Mac OS X will NOT be compatible with the recent beta version of Safari 4!!

Apple will launch a specific campaign via its Apple Premium resellers to boost sales of Mac. Entitled the "ecological bonus", similarly to the campaign launched by the French government to support sales of new cars, it will give customers the opportunity to change their current computer (working or not) for a new Mac, as well as 100 to 150 Euro of cash back for any purchase of a MacBook models or an iMac. The collected computers will be sent directly to the recycled networks.
This campaign will only be available in the APR from March 2nd till April 11th.

It will be interesting to know if such campaign is limited to French APR or i fit will be running worldwide?
Does it imply that the new iMac models will be unveiled the week after April 11th?

Optiarc has announced the release of the AD-7240S, their first burner of DVDs at 24X.

To reach this maximum speed on each type of media, the device uses its reading laser during the burning in order to check the upstream state of the media.
At the time of the release of the first DVD burners, it was considered that the maximum speed of burning would be 16x. There has been a 50% gain since that time.