“At issue is a dearth of electrical components and zealous inventory management policies, which industry insiders say will limit supplies of smartphones, MP3 players, game consoles and televisions this holiday season,” Woyke reports. “The shortage is anticipated to pinch retailers and manufacturers’ revenues and frustrate consumers who may not be able to buy hot devices.”
Woyke reports, “As a vendor of wildly popular, high-end consumer gadgets, Apple would seem to be particularly vulnerable. But experts say the company will have plentiful inventory thanks to its careful forecasts. ‘Apple is doing fine,’ says Jason Busch, the founder and Managing Director of advisory firm Azul Partners. Busch thinks Apple will avoid a holiday inventory crunch for three reasons: The first factor is smart forecasts… [2nd] is its heft… [and 3rd is] Apple’s focus on portable gadgets.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]
@Uncle Fester’s cousin
“A netbook running ubuntu can’t even keep up with an iPad performance wise.”
You must have had a bad install or something, 10.04 LTS runs pretty fine for a netbook on my machine. Nearly “OS X like” in use as well.
The iPad is a bit faster in appearance because of Apple’s A4 and iOS graphic tweaks than a $290 netbook, but then again it also costs twice as much. Also the iPad comes minus: keyboard, USB ports, monitor stand, camera, decent storage, self updating, etc. which I wouldn’t trade out for a tiny bit more speed. The risk factor for loss, damage, theft is also higher on iPads.
Despite what Steve Jobs says, the iPad really doesn’t compete with netbooks on any level, it’s just Apple’s version of a “netbook” or low cost computer.
Apple’s marketing on that is to get netbook type people into a Apple Store and try to up sell them. The $500 iPad is rather pitiful in storage capacity, purposely designed to be that way so lead people to spend closer to $1000 Apple intended to get people to spend all along.
iPad people will be spending money to turn their iPads into laptops, just like laptop people spend money to turn their laptops into desktops.
My opinion is Ubuntu (with Firefox, OpenOffice) is good for secure, non-commercial software basic netbook type needs but once you need more power like a laptop or commercial software it’s better to just buy a $2000-$4000 MacBook Pro with a huge hard drive (7,200 RPM) and plenty of RAM/ extended warranty to begin with and be done with it. One can always run Windows 7 in a virtual machine if need be.
installing Ubuntu on a net-book will yield a device (as I stated) that can’t even run hulu at standard def.
My ubuntu netbook with Atom processor/integrated graphics on cable is getting 380p, 16:9, Flash, 8 1/4″ x 6 1/4″ on Hulu smooth as silk. Any more than that drops frames.
Remember this is a netbook, not a dual core, dedicated graphics media PC/Mac. And high speed Internet isn’t widely available everywhere anyway due to it’s high costs, and if so, is usually shared amongst a lot of others.
If I was going to watch video and knew I had a high speed connection where I was going, I would drag my heavy and powerful MacBook Pro and watch at full 15″ screen size.
The netbook was designed as a lower cost, light weight, lower performance, portable laptop alternative, which the iPad is somewhat as well, but with considerable higher cost with a lot less features than a netbook.
With Ubuntu instead of Windows for the netbook OS, negates the need for processor hogging anti-virus.
installing Ubuntu on a net-book will yield a device (as I stated) that can’t even run hulu at standard def.
My ubuntu netbook with Atom processor/integrated graphics on cable is getting 380p, 16:9, Flash, 8 1/4″ x 6 1/4″ on Hulu smooth as silk. Any more than that drops frames.
Remember this is a netbook, not a dual core, dedicated graphics media PC/Mac. And high speed Internet isn’t widely available everywhere anyway due to it’s high costs, and if so, is usually shared amongst a lot of others.
If I was going to watch video and knew I had a high speed connection where I was going, I would drag my heavy and powerful MacBook Pro and watch at full 15″ screen size.
The netbook was designed as a lower cost, light weight, lower performance, portable laptop alternative, which the iPad is somewhat as well, but with considerable higher cost with a lot less features than a netbook.
With Ubuntu instead of Windows for the netbook OS, negates the need for processor hogging anti-virus.
DifferentLY
DifferentLY
Mark Bizzarro,
I tested and installed and tested almost a dozen different distros (and 4 versions of windows) on scores of various “net-books” as part of a consulting contract we had with a (large) school district.
We couldn’t even get 360P stream (scaled fullscreen) to display reliably on any (atom) netbook we tested with unbuntu/firefox/flash without running the atom in “ultra high performance mode” which can only be used while plugged into the wall (you can force ultra high performance mode while on battery but battery life is reduced (to a fraction) Also overheating (running video fullscreen in UHPM) was a major problem for almost every unit we tested.
Our conclusion was the net-books were $300-$400 toys, and as such they shouldn’t be considered for more than rudimentary video display and word processing and then only in limited circumstances.
BTW (if you care) the result of our evaluation was your best bet (on an atom netbook) would be Puppy, or if you have some Unix/linux skills to do a basic Debian install with a lightweight WM (like IceWM or OpenBox) and build it up with desired packages.
Ubuntu is a nice kitchen sink distro but is not well suited to limited (or old) hardware (and atom powered “netbooks” are severely limited hardware)
However, don’t kid yourself (or anyone else) net-books are severely limited, an iPad is literally in a different class performance (and battery) wise, and (as I said) MacBooks (including the new macbook air’s) aren’t even in the same league.
Mark Bizzarro,
I tested and installed and tested almost a dozen different distros (and 4 versions of windows) on scores of various “net-books” as part of a consulting contract we had with a (large) school district.
We couldn’t even get 360P stream (scaled fullscreen) to display reliably on any (atom) netbook we tested with unbuntu/firefox/flash without running the atom in “ultra high performance mode” which can only be used while plugged into the wall (you can force ultra high performance mode while on battery but battery life is reduced (to a fraction) Also overheating (running video fullscreen in UHPM) was a major problem for almost every unit we tested.
Our conclusion was the net-books were $300-$400 toys, and as such they shouldn’t be considered for more than rudimentary video display and word processing and then only in limited circumstances.
BTW (if you care) the result of our evaluation was your best bet (on an atom netbook) would be Puppy, or if you have some Unix/linux skills to do a basic Debian install with a lightweight WM (like IceWM or OpenBox) and build it up with desired packages.
Ubuntu is a nice kitchen sink distro but is not well suited to limited (or old) hardware (and atom powered “netbooks” are severely limited hardware)
However, don’t kid yourself (or anyone else) net-books are severely limited, an iPad is literally in a different class performance (and battery) wise, and (as I said) MacBooks (including the new macbook air’s) aren’t even in the same league.