“It has been a bumper year for the California-based [Apple]. More than three billion songs had been bought through the iTunes music store since 2001, and that 110 million iPods have been sold worldwide,” The Telegraph reports.
“Apple sustained the momentum by increasing the capacity of its iPod range, giving it a facelift, adding a new selection of pastel-coloured iPod shuffles, and introducing video-playback to a thinner, squatter iPod nano. Oh, and it launched a mobile phone,” The Telegraph reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Not-so-minor omission: Apple also released the iPod touch.
The telegraph continues, “In all the brouhaha surrounding the iPhone launch, it would be easy to miss one of Apple’s biggest successes this year – the upsurge in sales of its computers. Apple shipped more than two million Macs between July and September this year alone, a 34 per cent increase on those months last year… If Apple’s rise continues, it may soon be able to think about posing a more serious threat to Microsoft’s dominance.”
“Bill Gates’s company seems to have been caught napping, failing to get to grips with a consumer demand for flair, innovation and beautiful design,” The Telegraph reports. “But more worrying for Microsoft will be the backlash against its latest operating system, Vista, released in January. Its snazzy new graphical interface wasn’t enough to win over many consumers. Vista makes heavy demands of computers, and lots of people found it sluggish and bloated. Such was the lack of interest that Dell began to offer computers preloaded with the older operating system, Windows XP, as an alternative.”
The Telegraph’s Best of 2007: Apple iPhone – While there is definitely room for improvement, its intuitive interface and stunning good looks have set the standard that all future mobile phones will be judged by.
The Telegraph’s Worst of 2007: Windows Vista – While it’s lovely to look at, this operating system can feel sluggish. It has perhaps shaken consumer confidence in the Microsoft brand, and goes some way towards explaining why Apple’s star is in the ascendancy.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Linux Guy And Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
Slowly they awaken.
@ LorD1776
I wouldn’t be Pope, but if the job of “Posh Spice” ever opens up, I’m totally there.
ChrissyOne,
A worthy ambition. Personally, I would rather be Scary Spice….er…..I mean BECKHAM – DAVID BECKHAM!!! Yes, the strong and studly soccer player! ‘Cause that’s the way I roll, by golly. I will leave now.
lolz.
“Molesti,
I’m not going there dude.”
I suspect you already are.
Molesti, is that experience talking?
Does anyone have anything to respond about this article?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/12/06/dlmac106.xml
@ Craig Fine
Other than the fact that if you read it very carefully, it doesn’t say a damn thing? I have read 100-150 variants of it over the last 7 years. Mac viruses are coming… any… minute… now…
“Molesti, is that experience talking?”
Yes, in my experience, people who want to be David Beckham have decidedly gay tendencies and want to molest kids.
You guys are all fools. Apple will NEVER overtake MS, but you can keep your fanboy dreams alive.
“You guys are all fools. Apple will NEVER overtake MS, but you can keep your fanboy dreams alive.”
Here’s a nice poem for you, Ricky:
http://www.online-literature.com/shelley_percy/672/
In this world, things can change and do.
First, Apple’s market value has already passed that of IBM –
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2007/10/23.12.shtml
– and, now, I believe, that of Cisco, too. It’s a very very big player, whether you’re too stupid to realize that or not is irrelevant. It’s in the top three tech companies, and it’s most certainly not impossible that it will be worth more than Microsloth one of these days.
Second – and despite what you may think – Microsoft doesn’t sell most of the computers in the world. It only sells a lot of software that goes on other people’s. Microsoft makes its money off the back of the OEMs. That won’t go on indefinitely, if the OEMs can see a way out of that.
While the high end of the desktop market is moving to Apple – and pretty rapidly at that – it’s more than likely that increasing numbers of OEMs will start offering pre-installed Linux on the low end. Dell is getting its feet wet here. It’s a dead cert. that others will follow.
It’s blindingly obvious that Microsoft cannot compete on quality with Apple. Unfortunately for it, it can’t compete on price with FOSS stuff either.
You may be crowing. But that’s because you’re ignorant. I’ll bet Microsoft isn’t crowing. It must be fully aware leaner times are coming.
It can’t compete on quality or price. What it relies on is lock-in.
Microsoft will literally put an OEM out of business before it lets them help a competitor. This is why big OEMs like Dell keep introducing Linux support and then pulling it again when Microsoft flexes its muscles.
http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html#msoft
Microsoft had better hope they keep getting US administrations that’ll turn a blind eye to that, because all it’ll take is one that won’t.
Sadly, Leopard is not very stable now. Better than Bista. of course, but it really has a ways to go. Tiger did seem to stabilize pretty nicely, but Apple has to play catch up now with Leopard.
Molesti,
“Yes, in my experience…”. I’m sorry to hear you have had a traumatizing experience like this. Was it recently or as a child? Did it happen when you were a child playing soccer? I apologize if I have brought back painful memories for you. I will never refer to David Beckham again.
Hg Wells,
I like your stories.
Yes but within a day or two of purchase most are running Windows under Parallels or Boot Camp. The VistaMac is not far away from launch.
The Mac might now be the best computer for running Windows, but even so, anyone who buys one for that sole reason is wasting their money. Most Mac buyers are still buying them for OS X (if you hadn’t noticed, Vista is out of favor even with the PC crowd).
What’s that one hit? DOS 1 1o 6? Win 3.x? Win95? Win98? Win2000? WinXP? Vista? Word? Excel? Exchange? Outlook? Internet Explorer? Powerpoint? Windows Server editions? Halo? The list could just keep going.
Each of those had competition in their categories.
Yeah, but they also had unfair advantages. For Windows it was being chosen by IBM. For the rest it was being tied to Windows. The iPod, iPhone, Mac etc have had to compete from scratch on their own merits.
Okay, Vista is bloated and slower than XP, which was 13% slower than Win98… Hmm…. At this rate… Where is my slide rule and abacus? I know there here somewhere…
MOOF !!!
Pete 1967
When SJ returned to Apple Inc in 1997 . The stock was selling around $ 12. I bought some shares at the time.
“Bill Gates’s company seems to have been caught napping, failing to get to grips with a consumer demand for flair, innovation and beautiful design…”
Yes please, let’s keep Microsoft thinking that all they have to do is make shinier, newer-fangled products.
Of course, successfull products need fair, innovation and beautiful design. But the reason Apple’s blowing everyone else out of the water is not these things.
It’s the integrated, holistic design.
The iPhone’s data protocol (EDGE instead of 3G) is a textbook example. It’s evident that Apple looked at their options, and saw that they could either a) ship a product that had the latest and greatest spec, but sacrificed half its battery life to take advantage of a technology with poorer geographical coverage that would make browsing feel only marginally faster, or b) use a technology that was less sexy but would provide 80% of the capability with far less power consumption, lower cost, better predictability, and superior coverage.
Most other companies, including Microsoft, are stuck in a “feature laundry list” mentality that is just killing their overall product experience, but they can’t seem to bring themselves to cut stuff (probably stuff that focus groups have told them they must have in their next “cool toy”) in the name of simplicity and a disciplined product experience.
Another great example is desktop content search. Here was MS, sweating hard on a whole new filesystem (WinFS) built on database technology to enable this, and then Apple comes along with Spotlight and adds a couple of kernel services and an indexing daemon and boom, they’re done.
More designed with higher specs is not always better.
With Vista outselling Leopard almost a hundred to one, Microsoft’s sure giving Apple a good hard wilting in the marketplace.
I use a Dell at work and I have a MacPro laptop.
Let’s just say I hate using the Dell. Its slow, clunky and unresponsive. I can’t even get sound (because the company doesn’t want anyone listening on their computer), because there are no speakers plugged in. I don’t get it! You have to buy separate speakers after you paid for a computer?
If it wasn’t for my MacPro, I’d go crazy!