“Apple Computer sold 32 million iPods in 2005, but the company made a point of putting the ‘Mac’ back in Macworld Expo this week,” Jeff Carlson reports for The Seattle Times. “Apple sold 1.25 million Macs during the last quarter, compared with 1.05 million sold in the year-ago quarter, demonstrating that the personal computer is still very much an important part of the company’s business.”
Carlson covers the new Intel-based MacBook Pro and iMac personal computers and discusses iLife ’06 which includes a new application: iWeb. “As you might expect from the name, iWeb is aimed to be a Web page-creation tool for the rest of us (to steal an old but good Apple line), and it looks impressive,” Carlson writes. The applications that make up iLife ’06 and iWork ’06f “from an engineering standpoint, [have] already jumped one important hurdle: They run natively on both existing Macs and the new Intel-based Macs.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s 8-K, filed on Jan. 10, 2006, stating 1.25 million Macs sold in holiday quarter here.
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Related MacDailyNews articles:
Red Herring: deep questions linger about Apple Macintosh’s future – January 14, 2006
iThink, therefore iWeb.
Does anyone else remember this number of 1.25 million from tbhe keynote – I sure never heard it there. Am I missing something?
Yes, Steve did say 1.25 million Macs sold.
I sent this link to a discussion at apple support. There are serious problems with iLife, crashes, hangs, and other issues. iMovie in particular is really buggy. I’ve been with Mac since the mid 80’s, but I gotta tell you, this is the worst software release I’ve ever purchased from Apple.
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1115
I don’t know if he said it, but it was on one of the slides.
I sent this link to a discussion at apple support. There are serious problems with iLife, Garageband and iPhoto crashes, iMovie hangs while rendering the Ken Burns effect, and other issues. iMovie in particular is really buggy and much slower that iMovie 5. I’ve been with Mac since the mid 80’s, but I gotta tell you, this is the worst software release I’ve ever purchased from Apple.
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1115
I’d reccomend waiting until apple releases the fixes for these bugs before purchase
weird, posted twice while I was still editing…. anyway.. check the link before you buy.
Of course there are a few bugs that I’ve encountered with iLife 06 , but overall it is a worthy upgrade.
Most of the complaints and problems I’ve read about on the Apple forums are user related.. with the majority of issues stemming from installs on systems that are not properly maintained. PERMISSIONS..
I thought Apple was dying because Mac sales last quarter increased to 1.25M instead of to 1.5M?
Are they some how going to survive now?
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Mike….
I’ve repaired permissions, uninstalled flip 4 mac, and it is still glitchy and crash prone. My 7 macs are well maintained and the problem is not “user related”… there are SERIOUS problems with this software, I think it’s closer to being a beta release than an actual product ready piece of software. They should have had some real world users take it out for a spin first.
Obviously, “your mileage may vary” applies with any new application; Apple or otherwise.
I’ve been pushing all the iLife apps to the max for the past few days to get out more detailed articles. No crashes, no glitches, no notable issues. I’m running a cleanOS X 10.4.4. with QuickTime 7.0.4, including the slightly buggy Flip4Mac WMV (update to the 2.0.1 version), on a 3 year old aluminum PowerBook. Everything’s working OK for me. Go figure.
I agree with Mike above. Many problems are user related. The worst problem I’ve had in the past few years was on a PowerMac that crashed and went wonky from time to time. For a year. I was certain it was a bad Mac, bad motherboard, or crummy software until I took out a bank of RAM (I bought cheap; my bad). All problems ceased. Go figure.
That said, I’ve tried all the iLife apps on a stock 512meg RAM Mac mini, too. It works, but everything runs slooooooowly, compared to almost anything with 1 gig of RAM or more. Even slower than my 1Ghz, 1 gig RAM PowerBook from 2003.
Regarding the Red Herring piece on Macs. It’s an article, not news. They write those things to stir up a little noise; it breeds readership and they don’t care whether readers agree or not. So long as they come back to read again.
To check Apple’s “health,” compare numbers on both Macs and iPods. Gross margins remain strong on Macs, too. iPod sales are strong yes, but Mac sales are about double to triple industry growth rate. That’s a good sign.
Apple got iLife to universal binaries faster than expected. Apple launched Intel Macs faster than expected. Apple puts out iPod updates faster than expected. Apple stores are packed with people when the industry pundits said they would fail. Apple has about the same amount of money in the bank as Dell Computer. Apple’s market cap is about the same as Dell. Microsoft’s stock hasn’t budged in 5 years. Windows Vista gets no buzz or bad buzz. Apple gets buzz well beyond market share.
2003 through 2005 were great years for Apple. 2006 could be better. It looks as though everyone at Apple is working hard to make sure it is.
That said, I’m grumbling a bit about the annual Apple Tax (.Mac, OS upgrades, iLife upgrades, et al). I want Apple to be profitable and keep producing great products, but I could use a little slack on the tax.
Tera Patricks
Mac360
Good to hear you’re not having any trouble.. it gives a bit of hope. Question… have you used the Ken Burns effect on a photo in iMovie? That seems to be the common problem most people are having. It hangs about 3/4 of the way through and wont finish.
iLife crashy? Maybe I’m lucky but haven’t had a single crash, not one, and I’m a heavy user of iPhoto and iMovie.
Now take QX6.5… now there’s something that’s untrustworthy!
I’ve got the new iLife installed on a PowerMac and a Mac mini. Everything runs fine on the PowerMac but it’s loaded with RAM. All works ok so far on the Mac mini. The Ken Burns effect stutters a bit when loading photos to the timeline, and, of course it’s slower, but it’s working fine for me. YMMV holds true. No crashes on either box.
You notice how MDN tries to set the tone of the flow of the news here by the timing of the articles it presents? Negative news then followed by a positive spin article on the same thing?
Jim – regarding your iLife comments: Rule number one at MDN – even if you are a great supporter of Apple, know what you are doing, love your mac, your problem is legit, etc, etc…all you have to do is say one negative thing about anything Apple-related and the trolls come out to squash all unpositive notes about the god Apple and try to impune your credibility.
Would be real nasty if the new Apple software that is “universal” works great on the new Mactels, but not so great on the PowerPCs…..maybe iLife6 has some rosetta stuff baked in it….
I find with any iLife release it’s best to wait four weeks before installing. By then .01 releases are usually available for every component.
Jim, roll back to the previous version for the moment. It won’t be long before you can install it again. In the meantime, you’ve reported the problems to Apple, so the issues you’re suffering are likely to get fixed.
Possibly not what you want to hear, but at least experience should tell you that Apple are usually quick off the mark with the bug fixes.
I seem to recall when I got iLife 05 that rolling back to the old iPhoto was not possible (unless, of course, you had wisely created a backup of your photo library).
So, as always, if you’re installing new iLife, be sure to back up your exising iLife data first, JUST IN CASE.
el Predicto… boy you got that right. You should see some of the posts on the support site… serious kool-aid drinkers there (smile). I kinda figured I would get hazed a bit, but ah well. I emailed MDN the link two days ago…. I actually think I was the first post on the new iMovie 06 support page with issues… since then it’s grown fairly fast. Which is a testament to how many people are buying macs, and how many people are replicating the same problems I am having with some of the iLife 06 programs.
??? – I was also thinking that same thing, that maybe this version had some Rosetta stuff in it. Or maybe it was written for the intel mac and ported back to the power pc. iLife 05 worked fairly well on all of my Macs…. I had some minor issues… but not on all of the computers (There are 7 macs in my household – bought two family packs) so I was surprised how it kept crashing no matter what ‘puter I put it on.
Dave H. – You’ve got a great idea there. Guess I got too anxious and should have waited for iLife 06.1. I always am fairly cautious and don’t tend to be an early adopter of new software. But my previous experience with the iLife suite has been good, with iLife and iLife 05 working fairly well. And… this is Apple we’re talking about not MS. They don’t release software that is this buggy. When I reported my last bug to the iMovie 06 team I told them the new slogan at Apple should be…
“Apple… it just works! – (except iLife 06)”
Some on should follow up on Enderle as he boldly claimed that “the fourth quarter (2005), in particular, should be ugly for Apple.”
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/7184/
I remember the slide is question. I watched most of the keynote, skipping over the boring software stuff. The slide that Steve Jobs showed was a classic misuse of a graph to deliberately exaggerate differences between numbers – the technique that easily does the most to give statistics a bad name. The chart displayed an increase in Mac sales over the last 4 or 5 years, and at a glance it appeared that Mac sales had doubled once or twice during the short period of time. I then noticed that the number of Mac sales started at about 1 million (on the bottom of the chart, the x-axis) and went up to abobut 1.25 million (the top of the chart). Had the chart been done correctly with the x-axis being 0, then we would have seen the real picture – a basically flat chart, with a slight increase of a few percent each year.
I just went back in to see exactly what those chart numbers were.
Steve shows the chart at 01:01:50 in the keynote video. It charts the number of Macs sold, in thousands, starting at 1,000 and ending at 1,250, for only this last quarter. It makes it visually look like there was 500% the number of Macs sold in Q4 compared to in Q1, until you read the numbers and see that there was in fact 125% the number of macs sold in Q4 compared to in Q1. The sad thing is that a 25% increase is pretty good, but this misleading chart makes it look like they were embarrassed about it or something.
Interestingly, I noticed that the iPod sales chart was done correctly, going from 0 to 45 million. iPod sales have been incredible, so they had nothing to hide.
whoops! It was a 19% increase – Q1 sales were 1.05 million, not 1 million. Still, 19% is nothing to be ashamed of.
iMovie 06 FIXED! and working.
It was the 3ivx codec. As soon as I removed that, it’s plist file, and it’s preferences file, EVERYTHING worked. iMovie, iWeb, Garageband, everything…
whew!