Apple iMac shortage combined with ‘astronomical’ demand halves profits of New Zealand’s Renaissance

New Zealand’s “only distributor of Apple computers and iPods says interim profit halved because it does not have enough products to sell and warns the shortages will continue. Renaissance said yesterday that profit for the six months to June fell 53 per cent to $1.2 million,” Gareth Vaughan reports for The Dominion Post.

“Managing director Paul Johnston said though the shortage was mostly in Apple products,” Vaughan reports. “It has been estimated that between 50 and 60 percent of Renaissance’s earnings come from Apple products.”

“Mr Johnston said an upgrade of Apple’s iMac computer meant there had been a shortage of the old model and an ‘astronomical’ demand for the new model could not be met.
He was unsure how long the shortages would continue,” Vaughan reports.

Full article here.

42 Comments

  1. Memory leaks are bad news for you MAC fanbois, Microsoft cured that with Vista already, the OS takes up all the memory so there is none left to spill. You can’t edit memory leaks like you can the registry and buffer overflows can mostly be stopped by disabling DirectX, Windows Exploder, Java, Javascript, OutLook and almost anything else written by the fabulous Microsoft, even Vista – which magically gets rid of all of the problems you MACbois suffer.

    Be social, get a life, get passion

  2. “Maybe Gonzalez et al can claim a disability pension.”

    Alberto has tried to make that claim but the clerk at the convenience store makes the confused man in his pajamas buy something or leave.

  3. I never said the memory leak was caused by the hardware, I said it was present on the hardware. It is not present on my Dual G5. How can I tell? Apple was nice enough to provide us with an app called “Activity Monitor”. You can monitor all sorts of things with this beauty, including Wired, Active, Inactive and Free Memory. I usually use it to monitor the CPU(s), but then her iMac locked up. So I checked – after the re-boot, of course. Interesting behavior … the Inactive memory grew as I was using WoW (as in World of Warcraft, two capital Ws) and that memory was not returned to the “Free” pile when the program was killed. Nor did it return when I logged out. It did return when I did a Restart.
    My Dual G5 does not see this creep and the memory is returned to the Free pile when the game is killed. So … would the one of you who isn’t the son of a rabid worm suggest how two otherwise similar “systems” – same OS, same apps – would behave so differently – except due to a memory leak. Which might, or might not, be caused by the OS?
    And would someone else point out where I’m guilty of “bashing Apple”?
    Thanks
    Dave

  4. The memory leak is in Safari and Safari only. If the OS were causing a memory leak it wouldn’t show up in the activity monitor for Safari. I don’t know why you say Safari doesn’t cause a memory leak on your dual G5 when it does on mine. Always has.

    Oops. I don’t know about Safari 3. I de-installed it because Pith Helmet didn’t support it.

    The iMac has NOTHING to do with the memory leak.

  5. It’s a good idea to quit Safari every once in a while, and empty out its cache as well. Crud builds up, both memory allocation and bad cache entries.

    It’s difficult to get rid of all memory leaks in sloppy languages like Objective-C, C, or C++. It’s even hard to get rid of all memory leaks in rigorous languages like Ada. So why not go with the flow, lower stress that’s completely unnecesary (hence living longer), and do the simple maintenance?

  6. @DLmeyer

    Your original statement clearly implied that it was the fault of the hardware. My point was merely that it couldn’t be.

    Also, WoW for PPC and WoW for Intel are NOT exactly the same code, so there may be issues with one that do not exist with the other. Unless you’re having the same problem with other apps, it’s probably the fault of WoW or how it’s interacting with some of the hardware, not of Apple or its OS, and certainly not of the hardware itself as your post implied.

    I would suggest the WoW Mac Tech support forum, as I find the people there, both Blizzard and otherwise, to be very helpful.

  7. @Fighter of Freedom

    The problem could indeed be with the hardware, provided you count firmware (the code embedded by Apple in the hardware) as hardware, which most people do. Early Mac ][ processors had similar problems which, since updatable firmware was not yet part of the state of the art, were corrected by special routines in the OS.

    If the same code has a memory leak on the new iMacAl, but not on an Intel Mac mini, chances are we’re looking at a firmware glitch.

  8. The article is about Apple stock problems in Enzed not about some friggin’ memory leak. What, you all don’t give a damn about a shortage of Apple stock in another country. Talk about elitism. Jeez!

    What has been missed in all the contributions is that living across the strait (in dear ol’ Oz) there haven’t been any stock shortages that I’ve heard of. Perhaps it’s an Apple problem in NZ. Alternatively, perhaps Apple resellers underestimated demand for the new iMacs. However the problem seems to be limited to New Zealand and New Zealand alone.

    Now back to your comments on one contributor because I don’t want you to ignore that one person…just ignore the story. I mean that’s just fine right?

  9. Fighter of Freedom, your original comment was hardly the worst of those attacking mine, and thank you for answering. I think, though, you’ll agree that my comment implied a system problem, not a hardware problem. Yes, it could be the difference between PPC and Intel, or the firmware, or the second stick of memory!
    Yes, I ought to contact Blizzard about this … except there’s 848MB of Inactive memory right now (down from 1.1GB last night) and I have not run WoW since last reboot.
    Bob C, hadn’t thought of Safari. I’m running Safari 3 on my G5, Safari 2 here. I’d have thought, though, that a Beta would be more likely to have such a problem than software that’s two years and ten updates on.
    Walter Chillum, I did not intend to redirect this thread. My apologies that some here took the opportunity to bash me rather than to address the article.
    As has been noted by one who restrained, a product less than a month old isn’t likely to have caused a significant change in the past quarter’s earnings. The iMacAl was not even available this past quarter, not arriving until half-way into this quarter, so it would seem strange that Renaissance would make such a claim.
    Dave

  10. @Walter Chillum

    I appreciate your points. It’s regrettable that the first post was from DL Meyer, whose persistent use of this forum for on-line advertising has evidently pissed off a lot of users. Couple that with an, at best, technically misleading, off-topic comment, and the scene was set for a major diversion. Many posters obviously couldn’t wait to jump down his throat.

    Hijacked threads are a fact of life on many forums, including MDN. Just try making a comment for or against George Bush and watch it run.

    But you’re correct. Apart from a pertinent comment from GimliNZ, the opportunity was lost for some discussion on NZ supply problems. These problems extend to Mac parts also. A year ago, I had to wait over a month for a power supply for a G5 iMac. At least we can blame you guys for that one. Apple Oz, who supply Mac parts to Godzone, was out of stock!

    And DL Meyer, your Ad-free penance is noted and applauded.

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