“In reporting fiscal second-quarter results in April, Apple said it sold more than 4 million Macs during quarter, up 7% from the same period a year ago. By comparison, technology-research firm Gartner Inc. said that during the first three months of the year, worldwide PC shipments rose just 1.9% from last year’s first quarter,” Rex Crum reports for MarketWatch, “‘The iMac is doing pretty well,’ said Stephen Baker, PC analyst with NPD Group. ‘We continue to see more households that, when they do change a computer, they add a Mac. For Apple, it’s definitely a positive business that is chugging along.'”
“It’s been a little more than a year since Apple upgraded the iMac, but you couldn’t be blamed for not remembering that. The company didn’t hold any kind of special event to show off the iMac’s ‘next-generation quad-core processors, powerful new graphics, groundbreaking high-speed Thunderbolt I/O technology and a new FaceTime HD camera,'” Crum reports. “But with Apple’s annual developers’ conference set to start on June 11, there has been growing belief that the company will soon show off a new iMac in a big way, ahead of the back-to-school and holiday-shopping seasons.”
Crum reports, “This year, analysts such as Ben Reitzes of Barclays Capital say they expect a major new launch of the Mac line to come soon. In a note, he wrote that the new products will include the iMac as well as MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops, to be released in June. Such moves would coincide with Apple’s developer show. Reitzes said it is likely the Mac line will feature the retina-display technology used in the iPad, as well as the new Ivy Bridge quad-core processors from Intel Corp.”
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