“Each year, Apple Inc. sweeps out its old line of gadgets to make room for an even spiffier group of products for the holidays. And, each year around this time, Apple rivals and others dumbfounded by its multiyear winning streak in the electronics business wonder whether this is the holiday season when the company will finally stumble,” Nick Wingfield reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Don’t bet on it. This Monday, Apple will offer the first hint of how its computers, iPods and new iPhones are likely to perform during the crucial holiday shopping season when it reports its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings for the period ended late September. The earnings will include the first sales results from a new family of iPods and the iPhone’s first full quarter of sales,” Wingfield reports.
“Early signs suggest the new iPods are a hit. ‘They had just a tremendous September,’ says Tony Berkman, an analyst for Majestic Research, a financial-research firm that uses Internet sales figures from various sources to determine a company’s overall performance,” Wingfield reports.
“The iPhone appears to be selling well, too, especially after Apple dropped the price by $200 to $399 in early September. Analysts believe Apple will report about one million iPhones sold in the quarter ended late September, on top of the 270,000 they sold in the 30 hours it was available during the prior quarter,” Wingfield reports.
Full article here.
Here’s to the crazy ones!
Nice ad – Apple has always had the flair – well for all the years Jobs was in command anyway.
On the upside, making Ballmer sweat could end the drought for the western U.S. states.
Rainbow logo?
Umm yeah, from the early eighties up until about five years ago when they changed it to white, the Apple logo was always a rainbow.
@ ron
Yup, us oldies will remember this one. In fact, i’m sure there are many (myself included) who still prefer the old logo.
Best ad…ever!
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Don’t know if it’s true or not, but I heard that Jobs wanted it changed because it was to similar to the Keith Herring designed gay pride flag, which is also a rainbow.
I liked the rainbow logo, but I do think the white fits better with Apple’s current minimalist designs.
Yes I\’m crazy
But not criminally insane, apx 4% of websites contain bad images and rapidly increasing, your ISP is keeping track of your viewing habits. To surf the web for pron safely. Turn on pithhelmet safari plugin and adjust to rule editor preferences to filter all graphics out. This will render the page with text only, which one can get a pretty good idea if its safe for viewing. command shift r real quick will then reload the page with the graphics. The graphics will not be downloaded from their servers until you command shift r, so your not violating the law. or getting surprised by discusting animal/scat/piss/kiddie porn. Turning on/off pithhelmet is easy too, so you can just tailor the extreme rules when surfing for erotic material.
Now if only Apple would enable a feature like this.
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I don’t know if it’s true about Job’s no liking the rainbow logo, but it wasn’t gotten rid of because of any anti-gay feeling as some like to make out. The rainbow took years to become the preferred symbol of gay groups, but it was firmly entrenched as such at least ten years before Apple got rid of it.
It might be that Apple wanted to clarify and simplify their message, since by the mid-90’s the rainbow had a pretty strong Gay association, but people forget that the two symbols happily co-existed for a decade or so.
As the article above says, Apple is continually refining their product, rethinking their presentation, and freshening their brand. Even without the association with Gay groups, the old rainbow logo just screamed “1970” and they would have been replaced on that basis alone.
“Apple dumbfounds would-be rivals by continually pushing the envelope”?
Pushing the envelope with a 30-year old Unix distribution? Pushing the envelope with the same crappy MP3 players for the past 5 years? Pushing the envelope with music encoded with the proprietary AAC format—Sony ATRAC anyone? Pushing the envelope in running games on a MAC?
Rivals are dumbfounded alright. How does Apple stay in business making crap?
Your potential. Our passion.™
Talking about dumb(founded) rivals, or rather the management thereof, here’s a great video:
yep, how does apple do it making such poor products. Anybody got a gun to their head making them buy such lousy mp3 players. If you have an axe to grind and that is your only interest in apple, Mr. ZuneTang, why even read the articles. It will just upset you terribly. Why does the success of a company bother you so.
Hyperbilirubinemia,
Too funny!
By the way, what’s up with all the medical handles now on MDN – dextromethamphetamine man, Dopamine derivatives dude, and now you?
Are you a pediatrician, too???
“what’s up with all the medical handles now on MDN?”
Don’t strain yourself, Sherlock! (And no, I just like the names.)
:-p
Hey MDN, get with the program and embed video for the iPhone!
Jobs was not concerned with the gay flag connection. His intent was to refresh the brand in a way that would let go of old ghosts while making the logo flexible for a wide range of marketing initiatives.
Marketing 201
zunecrap, AAC is not proprietary. Do your homework.
“….. Pushing the envelope with music encoded with the proprietary AAC format.”
————-
Ummm, AAC is NOT PROPRIETARY.. Anyone can license it. AAC was not even created by Apple.
Zune Tang, you are too priceless. AAC is not proprietary. Plus, look at all the security threats and viruses that Windows has and still has.
Get a life.
I’ve always thought the Apple logo to be brilliant from a design perspective. Here’s why:
The best logos do things other than taking up space on advertising and packaging. They say something about the company (or product) they represent. They uniquely identify the company. And, the best of them, say something specific about the company.
In Apple’s case, the logo clearly looks like an apple, the company’s name. The bite (ie “byte”) out of it conveys in a playful and intelligent manner that the apple in question deals with bites/bytes. Bytes=computers. The rainbow, 8 coloured stripes, says two other things about the company/product: (1) it is a colour-producing machine, with the colours being (I think) the original colours displayable by the computer. And the 8 is significant because the original apple computer was a 8 bit machine.
Very clever, I’d say. An apple to denote the company’s name; a bite out of it to drive home the idea of “bytes”; coloured bands to emphasize that the machine delivers colour; and the 8 lines to represent the 8 bits of the processor. Genius. I wish I’d come up with it.
Obviously, with the processors moving to 64 bits and displays able to push millions of colours, the 8 coloured lines no longer tell the story. Refreshing the mark by moving away from the bits/colour story was a good decision. Thankfully, they kept the byte. Er, bite.
Rainbow logo…
Dropped for marketing and production reasons…
The current logo can be pressed, printed and embaused onto any product – a multi color logo takes extra steps to add the color, printed, set, or injected – a one color logo will not have that extra production time and the refresh was desired my marketing…
A win/win for Apple, as stated before the “gay” flag had little or nothing to do with it (Apple firmly intrenched in California would have no problem with the “hint” of an activist connection…
To Chris in Toronto:
Six, not eight colors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Apple_Computer_Logo.svg
That goes back to 1996/97, when Steve got back in command.
And there’s nothing else to say about it…
MW: growth… Think about it… differently…
Zune Tang, u idiot. “Rivals are dumbfounded alright. How does Apple stay in business making crap?”
Apple has for years demanded everybody in business a 2 dollar kickback for every product they have copied and produced. So even Apple makes crap, the better made copy products keep them in business. With the AT&T;somebody dropped the ball and now everybody knows it. Look at the Creative, they didn’t pay and where are they now?
I’ve been thinking that there would be some a appeal to an even newer Apple logo with a shape derived from what an apple looks like in cross section, i.e., cut perpendicular to its axis with the 5 seed clusters visible. The radial form suggesting connections all around, the seeds representing the future — that would somehow be a cleaner design than the silhouette of a partially eaten piece of fruit. JMHO.
Gandalf,
I saw that program and it was fascinating. I guess we owe our gratitude to all of those ignorant, short sighted old morons running Xerox back then. If they had followed through it would have been just like Steve said and they would rule the world. And what would Apple be, if anything? But what a crying shame for all of those awesome people working at PARC. I raise my glass to all of them.