Opening Music

Music is Say Anything by Manda and the Marbles

Mandaandthemarbles.com

www.mandaandthemarbles.com

The Gadget Locker

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Maccast pick of the week, ProCable - Headphone Adapter for iPhone from Radtech, just USD$6.95

Gadget Locker Pick

Apple Q1 numbers are in

Revenue of $9.6 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.58 billion.

iPod sales have slowed showing just 5% growth over last year. In the quarter Apple sold just over 22 million iPods for sales of around 4 million. Last year Apple sold about 21 million ipods for a total of $3.43 million in sales.

The higher dollar amounts are likely due to strong iPod Classic, iPod Touch and Nano sales.

2.3 million iPhones sold, a 107% increase over the same quarter last year.

Music sales were up $808 million vs. $601 million last year

Strong Leopard sales helped boost Software, Service and Other Sales. Apple earned $628 million in the quarter a 81% increase.

Peripherals and other hardware sales generated $382 million, up 29%.

Good numbers, but Wallstreet was tough. Apple shares dropped 11% in after hours trading on Tuesday.

Focus on iPhone Sales and Unlocked phones

iPhones accounted for 20% of all smartphone sales in Q3 of 2007 (Gartner)

Apple sold 4 million iPhones in the first 200 days it was on sale which averages about 20,000 per day

There are various reports out there, but estimates are that between 22-27% of iPhones are SIM unlocked.

A Reuters report quotes Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi as saying that, "if Apple hit its sales goal of 10 million iPhones by the end of fiscal 2008 but 30 percent of those don't result in any carrier payments, its revenue and profit would be $500 million and 37 cents per share lower than expected."

The same report alludes that Apple is in trouble because it not only effects their revenue sharing deals, and effects their ability to do deals with other carriers, but there is also not much they can do to protect the phone without risk of alienating iPhone purchasers.

I think they are overstating the financial downsides for Apple

Yes the revenue sharing agreements are lucrative for Apple, but they are only one part of the model

Apple makes a profit on every iPhone sold. iSuppli guesses as high as 50%, so that's about USD$200 per phone up front.

Every iPhone has the Music Store and requires you use iTunes. That means more music, TV show, Movie and Movie rentals sales with each iPhone sold.

The SDK hits next month and it is assumed software will be sold via iTunes and Apple will likely take a small licensing or service fee on each sale

iPhone halo effect is likely to help continue the trend of rising Mac and OS sales

Benefits from being the dominante mobile Internet device. Google, Yahoo, and other web service enabled apps on the phone could include other revenue sharing agreements. Ala, Firefox Google search model.

iTunes more popular than RealPlayer, duh?!

The site Website Optimization is reporting on some Nielsen Online data that showed iTunes passed Realplayer in unique users near mid-2007.

The study was of the top 4-streaming media players. Windows Media Player, RealPlayer,iTunes and Quicktime.

Lots of random Mac stuff

Pink iPod Nano

Fraggles and Farscape on iTunes

Quicktime 7.4 appears to break Premiere and After Effects

Microsoft Office 2008 Security issue and fix.

Office 2008 Security fix.

UK pulls get a Mac Ads featuring Mitchell and Webb

O2 increases minutes and SMS for UK iPhone owners.

Apple posts updates to Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and iWeb. Apple apparently has fired most of their technical writers, "Addresses compatibility with Mac OS X". b

Keynote 4.0.2

Pages 3.0.2

Numbers 1.02

iWeb 2.0.3

Macbook Air shipping Apple TV Take 2 Delayed

Apple announced Wednesday that the MacBook Air has started shipping and will be available throughout resellers, Apple on-line, and Apple Retail stores.

Email me with your stories and reviews as you get them and see them in the wild.

Air has a special install of OS X that is designed for only the Air and you need that version to restore according to technical docs included with the Air

Some third-party headphones may not plug into the MacBook Air headphone jack because part of the connector does not fit within the port hatch. Need an adapter in these cases.

Apple TV® software update is not quite finished and will be available sometime ein the next two weeks.

Deja vu? Isn't that what you said two weeks ago?

Wireless issues take Air out of unboxing

Apple has posted a technote saying the new MacBook Air may have WiFi issues with some older 802.11n routers.

Suggest upgrading the router firmware if possible.

Circus Ponies

Notebook, get your free 30-day Trial

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You don't have to take my word for it, play comment from James

iTunes 7.6 Firewall Permissions issue

Grant said after upgrading iTunes kept asking him to allow incoming connections for iTunes through the Firewall in Leopard

Re-install iTunes 7.6

What to know when buying external drives

Annette asked:

I have a question (two actually) and I know you have help. With so much downloading of movies and all these big files today, as well as Time Machine, external drives are a necessity. But what should I look out for when buying one. Drives are so cheap right but I don't want one that's going to fail on me in two yrs times.

What is RAID?

What to look for:

Brand and Warranty

In general warranty is set by mean time between failure

Self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology (S.M.A.R.T.)

Do your research on brands. Personally I like Seagate for desktop drives and Hitachi for portables. Other brands you'll see are Western Digital, Maxtor (now owned by Seagate), Samsung, Fujitsu, and Toshiba

Cases and enclosures are made by many companies. La Cie, OWC, G-Technology, Netgear, Iomega, SimpleTech, NewerTech, etc.

Size

Both in storage capacity and physical size

1.8", 2.5" or 3.5"

Also flash based SSD

Speed

4200, 5400, 7200 RPM

Buffer, an amount of RAM on the drive to store frequently accessed data from the drive.

Your use for the drive will largely effect what speed and interface you might want.

Interface, how you connect

USB2, Firewire 400 or 800, eSATA

Does it allow bus power

Network Attached Storage using Ethernet or Wireless.

What is RAID?

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives, Random Array of Independent Drives, etc.

Typically, multiple drives in one enclosure that use hardware or software to combine them together into a single logical unit. Your Mac will see them as one drive.

3 main ideas behind RAID

Mirroring, the copying of data to more than one disk;

Striping, the splitting of data across more than one disk;

Error correction (Parity), where redundant data is stored to allow problems to be detected and possibly fixed (known as fault tolerance).

Basically 5 types of RAID, but many sub-variations

The 3 most common are:

RAID 0 - Striped set without parity. Larger size and improved performance

RAID 1 - Mirrored, everything duplicated between drives. 1/2 storage and slower write times.

RAID 5 - Striped set with distributed parity. Requires at least 3 drives (usually of the same size) and size is 2-1, so 3 x 500GB in RAID 5 = 1 TB

Hot-swapable: you can replace a drive while it attached and running.