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Various sources show Apple's market share to deviate between
2.8% market share and
and 10%

Now, let us analyze these numbers in order to form an educated opinion on the matter.
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/01/19.1.sh tml tells us that Apple shipped
roughly 1.5 million computers. Let us realistically look at this number.
Assume
that 1.5 million computers were shipped to 1.5 million unique customers, so there are
at least 1.5 million Apple customers for the year 2002.

The truth is, the way technical progress is going, most customers upgrade their computers
at least twice a year, so now we only have 500,000 unique customers. However, if you
spend some time on the apple use groups, you will realize that out of 7000 people registered
in those groups, four out of five users only pretend to be Apple users for the coolness factor.
So, applying the same logic, gives us 100,000 true Apple users out of 500,000. The number of shipped
computers does not reflect the simple reality, that about 20% of all bought computers are
returned back to the company, so that makes 80,000 unique customers left. The people who buy
Apple computers and actually use them is even lower. Only about 70% of all bought computers are
put to some real use, which leaves us with 56000 customers. Out of 56000 50% are constantly stoned,
you can confirm this with the Switch testimonials from the Apple site, just look at their faces,
listen to what they have to say.... Ellen Feis, need I say more?
28000 sober users is still a
large number, Apple should be proud of the numbers of their true followers. Of-course, you have to
take into account that about a third of all Apple computers are sold outside of the USA, which
makes it impossible to say anything reliable about the customers outside of the country, so lets just
discard these, and this leaves us with a healthy 20000 customer user base. About half of all
computers are connected to the web, which makes them the true computer users (the rest are superficial
and do not deserve our time) so 10000 still sound pretty darn good for a company named after a fruit.

About 10% of all Apple users leave in Texas and 10% in Utah, and since we do not consider these
people to be civilized enough to use anything more complicated than a toaster, let's only focus on
the true, sober 8000 power users. Out of these 8000 customers about 20% has switched to Microsoft
products after success that MS displayed with their innovative and pattented UnSwitch compain.
So
we still have 6400 users. In general, Apple users to be very vocal in expressing their opinions, which
puts their already fragile health in strenuous conditions, such that they seem to have a
disproportionaly high number of heart attacks and strokes when compared to the general population.
So, out of the surviving 400 users (which is still a great user base and a market share) 50% are
female, and seriously, seriously, can females be considered computer users? I mean they must do
something with the computers they bought, probably most females bought their Apples as gifts and
decoration items.
Out of the remaining 200 men, US-Statistics Office reports, 120 were charged with
criminal offences of varying gravity, 40 were found to be linked to Al-Qaeda and a group of 12 were
last seen four months ago going North.
28 people left to account for. I personally know 20 Apple
users, out of which I consider 10 to be total A-holes, so they don't count.
18 rock-solid, head-strong
Apple followers, of-course from this number we have to exclude the blacks, the atheists, the homos,
the vegetarians.
This leaves us with 1 user. We have identified this truly great, unique individual
who, on his tremendously powerful sholders carries gigantic burden of sustaining profitability of this
money making machine, who some of us love to hate and the rest call Apple corporation.
We are here
to conduct an interview with this incredible person, with this true follower. He gratiously accepted
our interviewer. The interview took place in the house of this incredible person, the spectacular

97,000,000 dollar mansion located on the shore of the lake
Washington.
-I really like Apple, I use iMac and PowerBook daily, they never failed me. - These are the customer's words from the interview. -The only thing I don't like about the Apple computers, is that their keyboard lacks the Windows button on it, everything else is great!

According to
IDC Apple's Market share in July 2002 was about 3.48%. Things shouldn't have changed so much since then.

----
dead since was born

They are a somewhat major company so the DMCA violation wouldn't go unnoticed. Im not sure they would risk a lawsuit from a much larger company even if they hadn't been bought out.

Are you sure about that?

According to MacCentral. This could be good for the Mac, meaning the development team would have more access to Windows code and be able to guess how things are working less. Or it could be bad. And I have no idea what to think. Microsoft still makes money off of the license that goes with the sale of VirtualPC.

"Palladium is unlikely to stop you from copying music from your own physical media and onto your computer. Nobody WANTS to stop you from doing that."

Sure, For A Fee.[macworld.com]

This illustrates it nicely doesn't it? Palladium enables publishers to bleed more cash from you for less utility than you get today.

Also,

"However, Giving music to millions of people needs to become socially and technologically unacceptable."

Socially unacceptable sure, but to make that one idea "technologically unacceptable" (meaning not possible or extremely difficult?) you as a user may have to sacrifice more than you will ever gain.

Remember this? It looked really bad for Apple then, now there's another smudge on the Apple name.

I love Apple, but you have to admit that the $1/year fiasco was at least a PR mis-step.

"...A recent report published by Economic Research Institute and CareerJournal.com tracks executive compensation, and there was an interesting footnote -- the highest paid executive in the whole survey was Apple CEO Steve Jobs, even though he's not actively collecting a real salary in his role. The Executive Compensation Index tracks how corporate executives are being paid, and has been active since 1997. It tracks total cash compensation -- to wit, salary and bonuses -- for the highest-paid executives at 45 major U.S. businesses. It also compares executive compensation to corporate revenues. The report rates Steve Jobs as the highest paid executive for the most recent survey period -- although he collected $1 salary, he did get a US$43.5 million bonus, according to the data collected..."
and BusinessWeek ranked Apple's as one of the ten worst Boards of Directors due to: "...Founder Steve Jobs owns just two shares in the company. Recently departed director Larry Ellison had none and had missed more than 25% of meetings in the past five years. The CEO of Micro Warehouse, which accounted for nearly 2.9% of Apple's net sales in 2001, sits on the compensation committee. Since 2000, the board has awarded Jobs 27.5 million stock options and a $90 million jet. There is an interlocking directorship--with Gap CEO Mickey Drexler and Jobs sitting on each other's boards..." (a repeat post)

"...A recent report published by Economic Research Institute and CareerJournal.com tracks executive compensation, and there was an interesting footnote -- the highest paid executive on the survey was Apple CEO Steve Jobs, even though he's not actively collecting a salary in his role. The Executive Compensation Index tracks how corporate executives are being paid, and has been active since 1997. It tracks total cash compensation -- to wit, salary and bonuses -- for the highest-paid executives at 45 major U.S. businesses. It also compares executive compensation to corporate revenues. The report said that Steve Jobs was the highest paid executive for the most recent survey period -- although he collected no salary, he did get a US$43.5 million bonus, according to the data collected..."
and BusinessWeek ranked Apple's as one of the ten worst Boards of Directors: "...Founder Steve Jobs owns just two shares in the company. Recently departed director Larry Ellison had none and had missed more than 25% of meetings in the past five years. The CEO of Micro Warehouse, which accounted for nearly 2.9% of Apple's net sales in 2001, sits on the compensation committee. Since 2000, the board has awarded Jobs 27.5 million stock options and a $90 million jet. There is an interlocking directorship--with Gap CEO Mickey Drexler and Jobs sitting on each other's boards..."

Mono does alot more than just ASP.NET it also does Windows Forms.NET and all the other essential class libraries. So .NET already has good coverage on the Linux platform.

Development of support for .NET on OS X is already underway so there's a likilhood .NET will soon offer cross platform solutions for Windows, Linux and Mac which is pretty much the entire desktop market.

I like this quote from a Maccentral article: ...Jobs delivered the morning keynote to Intel's annual sales conference in Las Vegas.

Maybe there's hope for OS X on Intel after all. Goodbye Classic, Goodbye Altivec, Hello to some driver rewrites, but what a great leap in price/performance!

I can't think of a better model to begin this transition with than the XServe.

The Pluto-Kuiper express space craft was going to use the G3.

The biggest problem with the Mac user base, is blind loyalty.

here is source one

source two

this was a great move as well

this is a classic

another example of Apple's fine legal department

I can link to countless other tales as well and just a little friendly advice, recounting X amount experience comes off as foolish and condescending. Personal experience with anything is not an accurate benchmark. Apple has a great product with OSX, as a tibook owner, I'm very happy, but Apple the company is not as great as their user base perceives it to be and somehow they think buying an Apple product makes them part of a movement, which is completely ludicrous, but a marketing success nonetheless for Apple

1. 
   Pentium Floating-point division bug (it's close enough, isn't it?)
   Invalid Operand Instruction crashes original Pentiums Pentium crash codes
   Pentium Pro/II still having problems with floats Unable to convert to int
   Pentium III can't even start up You went faster with an 8088
   SSE is great for when you want your PIII to crash Pretty blue screens abound.
   PIII Xeon, quality you can count on, except at high CPU usage Watch the task manager, Phil.
   Yay, PIII MTH crashes! Does MTH stand for Meth?
   Total Recall 2: PIII@1.13GHz Fastest crashes ever.
   Total Recall 3: PIII Xeons@800/900Mhz More Xeon quality in a box.
   Total Recall 4: CC820 How many defects? Can't recall...
   Pentium 4 overwriting data Hope it wasn't something important.
   Pentium 4 chipset bug Fast video performance? Naaa.
   P4 Oracle/Sun problems More workarounds than work
   Itanium shipments halted That's an expensive oops.
   

A few days ago, I read in MacCentral that Weibetech had developed a AES based system to encrypt hard drives.

Let's go back to DVD Player. In many ways, it's the weakest program Apple gives away...How about letting me insert my own bookmarks, so I can always zip straight to the line where Chief Marge tells Lou that she's not sure if she agrees with his police work? How about if every time I eject a disc, the program remembers where I left off and takes me right there the next time I insert it, even if that's months later?

How about if a single menu item took me to a Sherlock 3 DVD tool that assembled production information from the IMDB, reviews from RottenTomatoes.com, and related movies from the same filmmakers-all in one window? What if the player could silently extract subtitles during playback and index a time-coded transcript?

Everyone seems so suprised and worried about names like 'Apple'

Now, I can understand your skepticism about some of the other companies on the list, but Apple? Apple has shown time and time again that they are focused on not hindering the rights of consumers to do what they want with legal content. At the Grammys, Steve Jobs explicitly pointed this out when he said "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own."

To date, about the only "anti-piracy" measure Apple has instituted is a little sticker on your iPod that says "Don't steal music." Apple has made it clear that you should not punish users who act legally because of the actions of those who break the law.

At last I found it by myself: Newton used ARM back in 1996

After a quick research - they were made by Sony called Glasstron Goggles PLM-A35/55 but seem to be out of production now. At one point they also anounced support for macs.

Apple make profit ? currently they are losing money at the rate of $8,000,000 a 1/4

o sorry, your new around here arn't you ?

It is a sector-level hard drive encryptor that aims to be very easy to use as well as portable. It uses the Advanced Encryption Standard's Rijndael Algorithm.

It is easy to use because the only software the user needs to install is a simple applet that allows entry of the passphrase. There is no complicated operating system-level software to install or configure.

The encryption implementation itself is entirely contained within a FireWire to IDE bridge.

The FireWire connection also makes the product portable, because FireWire is an external hot-pluggable serial bus.

MacCentral covers the FireWire encrypt here. You can read WiebeTech's press release about it in Microsoft Word format here.

I issued a press release (my first ever!) to annouced that I developed the software for WiebeTech. I posted the press release at http://www.wiebetech.com/press/. Sorry I just have Word format available at the moment, but I will post it in HTML in a little while. I'm tired!

I have more technical details on the product in my Kuro5hin diary.

WiebeTech is demonstrating FireWire Encrypt working with Mac OS X at the show, but we plan to support the product on Windows, Linux and classic Mac OS by the time the product is released to the public. (I personally run Slackware on my x86 box and Debian on my PowerPC Macintosh 8500).

Thank you for your attention.

Pleeeeeease!

Link your links

Use "view page source" to find out how (remember to post as "HTML Formatted"

Wasn't there an article awhile back about not being able to use Apple DVD software without buying their DVD-ROM, or something similar?

There may be various reasons for this. It may be that iDVD only includes drivers for IDE DVD-R burners (and thus, you need to have a burner on the internal IDE chain, which would presumably be factory-installed). Whether there's a technical reason or not, Apple is using this fact as a marketing tool for its Superdrive-equipped Macs, and they don't want anybody messing with it.

For a while, a company called Other World Computing provided a "crack" that would let iDVD work with third-party burners (like the ones OWC sold). Apple pressured them to discontinue the software.

The reason you can't crack the player to run on other hardware is that Apple wasn't concerned about protecting their player - rather they didn't want to have to deal with thousands of different models of DVD-ROMs requiring thousands of different drivers.

They can pump out a whole hell of a lot of those things, and I guess they much just have a couple of big-ass warehouses full of them sitting somewhere.

Apple typically only has in the channel anywhere between 1-6 weeks of inventory. Their last financial results for Q3 2002 said that total channel inventory was reduced from 6.5 weeks of channel inventory in Q2 2002. So, no, they don't have "big-ass" warehouses full of them.

Also, don't forget, a statistically significant percentage of Apple's sales are build-to-order through the Apple Store website. If they had, indeed, stopped producing the iMac 15, I'd imagine that build-to-order would be rather difficult.

Apple did indeed stop producing the iMac 15's - briefly. As I recall, Apple issued an order to stop production of the iMac 15s early 2002, in an attempt to get channel inventory down. I believe, however, that production resumed shortly after. I'm also not terribly surprised that Apple would stop producing the current iMac 17 in June... in fact, I'd be more surprised if they wouldn't. Anticipate a revised iMac to be announced at the latest by June.

So.... just like the iPod then, which works on other platforms only due to 3rd parties reverse engineering parts of the on disk format?

Here is proof to the contrary. It took them a while, but Apple did release a Windows compatible iPod.

Even Dell sells them.

You must have missed the announcemnt a few months ago.

Anyway, the Mac version just uses HFS. There are 3rd party HFS readers for *nix and Windows. I don't know if they were reverse engineered or created from Apple specs.

Except OS X isn't tinkerable at all. Practically all the code Apple has written is closed source, and the Mac parts of MacOS are generally only capable of doing things one way.

If you ignore the fact that you can recompile the kernel and change most OS variables using XML plists and NetInfo, you are absolutely correct. If I ignore my need for oxygen I can breathe in space too.

I remember seeing, at one time, stats showing Linux to have a 4% share of the desktop market. I think that is what the parent cites. As I have only seen that stat in one or to places over the past 3 years, I do not believe it is very accurate. Of course, you can always pick and choose which stats you want to use (e.g. the year or the type: number according to use or number according to sales). I think the same year Linux had a less than 1%, Apple had about 2% (according to another research firm), so the parent must have chosen a 2001 stat and compared it to a 1999 stat. Here are some stories (courtesy of google).

1999 IDC (International Data Corporation): less than 1%.

2001 WebSideStory: less than .25%

2000/01? IDC: 4% Linux, 5-6% Apple

...in certain cases a trademark can be copyrighted. Arghh!

Mickey Mouse is a classic example IIRC.

Apple's jumped in, too.

Some devious mind proposed, "Can You Patent a Copyrighted Trademark?"

No comment.

[posted by Melantha_Bacchae on MacSlash, edited a bit for clarity:]

I am getting sick of posting this correction.

OWC hijacked iDVD (in violation of the iDVD license, not the DMCA) to sell their own DVD-R drives in competition to Apple. Apple asked them to stop, and they complied to preserve good relations. This happened back on August 12, with *no* mention of the DMCA

Note that the reference to the DMCA in the news.com article is purely the quote of Other World Computing's president. There is no quote from any document they received from Apple, or any actual evidence other than the OWC president's word. The story is from the same silly news site that manufactured the "Apple + Sun = true love and Star Office for OS X" story.

Lacking any actual proof, beyond someone's say-so who has an axe to grind, reported on a flaky news site, I'm going to presume that Apple is innocent here. After all, who would you believe, a company that has taken the RIAA to task over their anti-piracy excesses, or one who tried to capitalize on someone else's hard work in order to compete with them?

About the same time that things suddenly got very quiet about MS-Passport, Microsoft got it's wrist slapped for lying about MS-Passport. In short, it looked very much as if Microsoft were lying about the security capabilities of MS-Passport. Similar discrepancies between marketese and facts exist with .NET and Palladium as with MS-Passport, so expect those two to fall next.

Funny this should also be posted today:

Man arrested for leaking Apple documents
by Jim Dalrymple, jdalrymple@maccentral.com
December 11, 2002 4:10 pm ET

Apple on Wednesday filed a civil complaint in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Santa Clara against a former contract employee for leaking documents. In addition, according to court documents filed last week, the District Attorney in Sacramento, California is also pressing criminal charges and the man has been arrested.

Jose Lopez -- who was contracted by Apple through the Volt Services Group -- and an unnamed person referred to as Doe 1 are named in the civil complaint filed by Apple this morning. Lopez worked for Apple as a contractor last summer when schematic drawings and other details about Apple's Power Mac G4 were released on the Internet.

"Apple has filed a civil complaint against Jose Lopez, previously employed by Apple as a contractor, who we believe stole Apple's trade secrets by posting schematic drawings, images and engineering details of an unannounced Apple product on the Internet," an Apple spokesperson said in a statement to MacCentral today. "Innovation is in Apple's DNA, so the protection of trade secrets is crucial to our success. Our policy is to take legal actions where necessary to preserve the confidentiality of our intellectual property."...(more) .

Actually, eWorld was an earlier effort than what I was thinking of. (More.) It appears the focus was on setting up a portal but not trying to compete on access. Their early alliance with Earthlink (what happened to that?) might have been a gesture towards some sort of synergy. Anyway, the distinction between access and portal probably goes right by most consumers, taking us back to the trademark problem. (I went through enough agony in my old job trying to explain to my boss the difference between RAM and hard drives, and why we needed to buy both.)

I remember that there is www.appleisp.net What up with that? There's not even the usual "in no was associated with" disclaimer.

We have the technology today! Flexible LCDs are a reality. The tech used in the movie is entirely reasonable and practical: cameras shoot a picture from one side of the car and project the image on the other side.

When Q (Cleese) walked around it on that first shot, you saw his legs get huge and flash by as he walked in front of one of the cameras. That was the touch that made it beleivable.

You'd be better off making fun of some of the other stupid things in the movie, such as the entire driving-around-in-the-melting-ice-palace sequence.

if your palm uses smartmedia or compact flash cards than you can store up to a gig of music depending on how much money your willing to shell out. more info here

I'll take rivalry, thanks.

Yes it is a true story ... but there is more than one story. Apple has been rabidly aggressive about not letting iDVD work without their branded SuperDrive. I'm not sure why this is because, to my knowledge, they don't sell software to burn to generic DVD drives, and don't want anyone else to either. It's not like iMovie and Final Cut Pro, there I understand they don't want people using iMovie without a new Mac.

Here are a few articles about this topic to chew on:

Legal restrictions stop the sale of SuperDrive eMac

Apple: Burn DVDs--and we'll burn you

Hope this helps the original doubter of this fact.

Spatch

Check out this:

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0211/14.pooch. php

There is an article in the November issue of macworld about setting up a Apache, php, mysql web server.

I tried to find the article on-line but was unsuccessful. Maybe someone else can find it and put in a link.

As for DRM - I'll believe it when I see it ....

MediaBin Project Manager

http://www.jobmanager.com/

Or even, Zenark 2: Digital Asset Management

Office X is written in Carbon, which is a compatability layer to allow Mac OS applications to work seamlessly with Mac OS X with minimal code tweaking. Sadly, Carbon applications cannot easily be ported to other platforms. According to this article, Microsoft's MacBU unit chose Carbon because it allowed them to port their code to Mac OS X in a year.

Even if Carbon allowed for easy cross-platform compatibility, it would be at the source code level and not the binary level. The best hope we would have to run Office X on Linux would be to couple Mac-on-Linux with a fast PPC system emulator for x86. Unfortunately the latter does not exist (to my knowledge).

Giga predicts Apple will offer OS X on x86 next year:

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0210/28.intel. php

at least according to this amusing article at MacCentral

1. The logout button is a computer monitor with a night time scene. This icon has been synonymous with activating the screensaver since the days of After Dark. (Yes they used the flying toasters, but the TSR icon was a nighttime monitor. The icon is a reference to the name "After Dark".) The only connection I can come up with between night and logout is that you logout out at night, but in all honesty, people don't. They lock the screen. The old exit icon (an arrow point to an open door) would make much more sense.
2. The OK button features a down and to the left arrow. This is THE EXACT SAME ICON on my enter key. Of course the enter key, is not always associated with the OK button. Instead enter is associated with a 5 pixel inset around a button, which is much more obvious than the giant picture THAT LOOKS JUST LIKE A KEY ON MY KEYBOARD. This UI comes from someone who liked Borland's Windows widgets. Of course Borland only used the arrow on default okay buttons, a subtle, yet important distinction apparently lost on the the GNOMErs. (I've been using GNOME since 1999 and I STILL have to think, "wait. The 'enter arrow' doesn't mean enter.".)
3. Themeability is given a higher priority than usability. Case in point: Nautilus.
   The Captains of Nautilus stated that they are spending their time fixing Nautilus's theme engines so that nautilus uses the gtk themes (Oh my! Everything should look consistent! Apparently making everything themeable/skinable has fallen out of favor. (Thankfully.)), rather than say fixing Nautilus's iconview cleanup? Want to arrange your icons? Well you can "Clean up by name", and you can...um....uh.... Did we mention "clean up by name"? That's right, you have only one option. Which wouldn't be so bad, if you also had a simple "clean up" option that moved the icons to the nearest grid, say like Finder's "clean up", or Explorer's "Arrange Icons". No, instead we're stuck with either having all our icons alphabetically arranged along the left hand side of the screen, or all messed up.

In 1999 Apple invested $100 million into Samsung and uses their LCDs for their own displays.

MacCentral is quoting the head of IDG saying that they may consider banning Apple from all expos! Either this is negotiating, or as you said there is a madness that affects marketing/PR people. There are even mayors and senators offering to fly to Cupertino to resolve this for Christ's sake!

Apple could be pulling out of MacWorld East for strategic reasons, but I think its more likely that they are cutting back on spending in a big way. They posted a pretty big loss this last quarter. Steve Jobs is quoted as saying:

Looking forward, we do not expect our industry to pick up anytime soon, though we're hoping to help put a lot of iPods, iMacs and iBooks under trees this holiday season, said Jobs.

Since those stories came out on the 28th, at least one analyst has given Apple stock a strong sell.

To me it makes perfect sense that Apple would make spending cuts in the same place every other company does - Marketing. Trade shows. Magazine ads. TV commercials (though I expect with the coming holiday season coming and Apple wishing hard for a profitable holiday season, that the commercials are likely to keep the bulk of their funding for their TV commercials going).

Apple calls Cupertino, California home. Seems reasonable that they can attend MacWorld West for a significantly lower cost than MacWorldEast. I suppose one can call that a strategic move. Saving money is a strategic move if the situation necessitates.

I think the screw up is failing their responsibility to their shareholders to be profitable.

And I think that as much as Apple sees MacWorld East expendible, I think its a poor idea to have NO official presence there. Are they hurting IDG? Yes. Attendance will be down and some companies will not go as a result of Apple taking a powder. Spending less money on marketing does not result in an increase in sales. I wonder if they will need to do any layoffs.

I think that when Apple made themselves an institution, they took on the responsibility of maintaining that institution. Bottom line, Apple really needs to be at a tradeshow they are ultimately responsible for and would officially own except it could be an uncomforatble conflict of interest with all of their partners, resellers and customers. They are damaging their institution.

In the end, its just my optinion though. I can try to analyze what I read in the news and what I know about software companies.

The slump in the high-tech industry hit home as Apple announced a $45 million loss for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2002.

Since that article appears short, here are some more interesting links on mini fuel cells powering gadgets:

Discussion from January of the concept
Apple Laptops
Air clearance for them

Pardon me, but have we all forgotten whose team Corel is batting for?

what are
Have you every tried using a single line pen scanner to do actual work? If not let me tell you if you are trying to scan more that a full page of information it is a PAIN

you
ISA card ... floppies... ITS AN APPLE LAPTOP!!! -think about it for a second

talking
"Mac compatibility only with Virtual PC CD-ROM Drive"
Lets just spend another ~$130-$250 to get THIS to work

about - ummm ok good luck finding this one ...pst that article is from 99, and after seaching for about ohh 2hrs i only found ONE and that was an Ebay Auction with 23hrs left to go.

• NEC Portable scanner
• Primax Hand Held Colour Scanner

I must admit that there doesn't seem to be much around, but then again this simply from searching Google. And for those of you content with scanning bar code from books, then there are fancy iMac coloured bar-code scanners.