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Get new life out of an old Mac Pro (Updated)
You've been drooling at the video of the new Mac Pro, but realize that your chances of having enough money to buy one of the cylindrical black speedsters when they ship this fall are slim to none. Not to worry -- iMore's Peter Cohen has just the answer if you'd like to add some life to your existing Mac Pro. What Cohen wisely suggests is replacing your old Mac Pro's hard drive with a solid-state drive (SSD). He borrowed a couple of SSDs from Other World Computing (aka OWC) and put 'em through the test. The first was a SATA-based drive, the Mercury Extreme 6G (480 GB for US$549.99), while the second drive was a PCI Express-based drive called the Mercury Accelsior_E2 (up to 960 GB for $1,289.99). The Mercury Accelsior_E2 is unique in that it's a PCI Express card with an SSD built on. Cohen notes that you can upgrade the SSDs down the road, as the PCIe card-based devices have removable SSDs on them. Any Mac Pro from 2008 or later should work just fine with this drive placed into one of the two 16x slots, while 2009 and newer Mac Pro models will get the best possible performance from any slot. I won't divulge all of Cohen's test results, but let's just say that the SSDs -- especially the Mercury Accelsior_E2 -- smoked the basic hard drive in terms of performance. While the maximum capacity versions of these drives aren't exactly cheap, they're certainly less expensive than any new Mac Pro will likely be. Update: An OWC spokesperson noted that Cohen was working with incompressible data, and that using the QuickBench suite of tests, they were able to show that the Accelsior_E2 can achieve read and write speeds that are in the 671 - 686 MB/second range (see below). Since the QuickBench suite tests more day-to-day usage, those who aren't using their Mac Pro primarily for video editing or manipulation of large files will see an even better improvement in performance.
IDC: Mac shipments down. Gartner: Mac shipments up.
It must be tough to be a market research firm these days. IDC released preliminary information of PC shipments for the first calendar quarter of 2013 today, showing the market to be dismal with an overall decline in PC shipments of almost 13 percent in the US year-over-year and Mac shipments apparently down 7.5 percent in the same period. On the other hand, Gartner's figures -- also released today -- show an 9.6 percent year-over-year decline in the US PC market, and shipments of Macs actually growing 7.4 percent in the same period. With Apple's fiscal second quarter earnings report coming up in less than two weeks, the conflicting numbers are sure to make financial analysts reach for the bottle of Jim Beam hidden in a desk drawer. As if the numbers from IDC and Gartner weren't perplexing enough, 9to5Mac points out that NPD Group's numbers show sales (not shipments) of Macs jumping a whopping 14 percent. Who's right? We'll all have to wait until the afternoon of April 23 to see the actual numbers from Apple. If history repeats itself once again, we're sure to see stellar numbers from Apple for most product lines, followed by a precipitous drop in AAPL's share price. You can join us for all the fun during our regular earnings call liveblog at 5 PM ET on April 23, 2013.
Visualized: iOS 2011 sales smoke 28 years of Mac
Love it or hate it, Apple had a pretty stellar 2011. According to crunched numbers from Asymco, between its iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, the Cupertino outfit sold some 156 million iOS devices in 2011, marking a grand total of 316 million in the mobile OS' short history. What's most interesting here, however, is the fact that last year's digits alone have completely blown past the 122 million units daddy Mac has managed in its 28 years of existence. It's no wonder the company borrowed a few tricks from iOS for its latest desktop operating system.
Other World Computing at Macworld iWorld 2012
If there's one company at Macworld | iWorld 2012 that epitomizes the leading edge of Apple accessories, it's Other World Computing (OWC). At this year's event, the company is showcasing a number of new or soon-to-be-released products for Mac and iPad. In the Mac realm, OWC is about to release two new versions of the venerable miniStack external drives for the Mac mini. The miniStack Max and miniStack have the same footprint as the post-2010 Mac minis, and features FW 400/800, USB 2.0/3.0 and eSATA (optional) ports, as well as an optical drive (Max only) and USB hub. When it comes to enterprise storage, OWC has announced and was demonstrating their new Jupiter mini-SAS storage solutions. Jupiter features input/output speeds three times faster than fibre channel and twice as fast as Thunderbolt, all with an infrastructure cost much less than you'd pay for fibre channel storage. Companies deploying iPads will like the new GripStand Station, which charges and secures up to eight iPads at a time. There's more to come in this short video from the show floor:
Apple making huge strides into government, enterprise and small business
On Friday, Needham analyst Charlie Wolf released a research note stating that Apple had made some huge advancements into the government, enterprise and small business markets in the US -- sectors typically dominated by Windows PC sales. Total shipments of Macs increased 66 percent in the first quarter of 2011, while PC sales only increased 4.5 percent. Apple's gains get more interesting when you break them down into sectors. In the same time period, Mac sales increased 94.7 percent in enterprise (large businesses) and 80.4 percent in small businesses. In government, Mac sales were up a whopping 155.6 percent, while PC sales were up just 2.3 percent in the same market. In the education market, Mac sales only increased 1 percent, but PC education sales decreased by 6.5 percent in the same period. Finally, home or consumer sales were up 21.6 percent, while PC sales were down 4.4 percent. Considering the stagnation of the PC market in the same period, those Mac sales numbers are extra impressive. Apple's growth isn't limited to the US either. In Europe and Asia, Mac sales increased 8 percent and 70 percent, respectively, while PC sales fell between 10-20 percent.
NPD: Mac sales up 47% in March
The numbers are out on NPD's March report for computer sales, and our favorite Apple analyst, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, said MacBook Pro sales continued to drive Mac sales overall, boosting them up to a 47 percent year-over-year-growth. Munster says that despite an overall drop in the amount of PC sales worldwide, Apple will likely announce Mac sales of 3.6 to 3.7 million units, which is slightly more than Wall Street expects. iPod sales, however, are reportedly down according to Munster and NPD's accounting. The analyst still expects sales to come in above expectations, but they're charting a 10 percent year-over-year drop for Apple's music players. Apple is set to announce earnings during a conference call this Wednesday -- we'll be listening in, of course, and we'll let you know what we hear.
Mac growth outpaces market for 19 straight quarters
If you've been following Apple's quarterly financial calls for the past several years, you know that many of the new products -- iPhone and iPad, specifically -- have been selling like the proverbial hotcakes. But you might be surprised to know that Apple's 27 year-old Macintosh personal computer line has seen a remarkable resurgence in sales. John Paczowski at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital looked at the skyrocketing sales of Macs in a post today. As he notes, Apple's first quarter 2011 results (ending December 31, 2010) marked the 19th consecutive quarter that Mac sales have outperformed the PC market. In the consumer market, the Mac posted growth in shipments of 17.1 percent over the previous year, while the rest of the market declined about .6 percent. But the surprising numbers are in the business market, where the Mac showed 65.4 percent growth year-over-year compared to 9.7 percent for the broader market. Things really get crazy in the government market segment, where sales of the Mac grew at an astounding 549.5 percent (of course, the government market only accounts for about one percent of all Mac sales). Paczowski notes that Needham analyst Charlie Wolf credits the halo effect for the surge in sales. People who purchase and grow to love an iPod, iPhone or iPad are more likely to buy Macs. Since iPads are being tested or deployed in most of the Fortune 100 companies, IT departments are also beginning to look at the Mac in a new light.
Apple could sell record-breaking 4.3 million Macs this holiday
Sometime in January Apple will hold their FY2011 Q1 earnings call, and you will be sure to hear these words: "The quarter that just ended was the best quarter in Apple's history." It's something many of us have gotten used to hearing as Apple has said it (or a derivative of it, adding "non-holiday" between "best" and "quarter") every quarter for at least the last seven years. That familiar catchphrase shows no sign of stopping as NPD says Apple is on track to sell between 4.1 million and 4.3 million Macs in the December quarter. As AllThingsD points out, Apple's U.S. Mac sales are up 20 percent year-over-year for the first two months of the current quarter. International sales are growing even faster than domestic sales with 22 to 28 percent year-over-year growth for the first two months of the current quarter. Still haven't picked up Apple stock? There's still time as many think there's a 30ish-percent 12-month upswing coming.
Mac sales growth continues to surge ahead of PCs 3 to 1
In a pattern that has become very familiar to watchers of the computer market in the last few years, sales of Macs have grown at three times the rate of computers powered by other operating systems. According to a report issued by IDC, Apple computer sales jumped 28.5 percent in the July-September 2010 quarter compared to the same period in 2009. Sales of other personal computers only grew by 9.7% in the same period. The single biggest jump in sales has come from the business market, which is up by 66.3%. Among large and very large businesses, sales spiked 146% and 202% respectively, which is an excellent sign for Apple. Those large businesses tend to be controlled by large IT departments, which are typically very conservative when it comes to computer system upgrades and replacements. The popularity of iOS devices among executives and the more tech savvy is probably playing a big part in convincing these companies to take another look at Apple on the desktop. According to IDC's estimates of average selling prices, Apple is also now the dollar market share leader in the U.S. home market with 29.4% of all the dollars spent on computers in the period. However, this figure is open to debate based on IDC estimating a higher average transaction price than Apple's own results. Regardless of which revenue estimate is correct, it's clear that Apple is gaining a lot traction in every market except education where PCs outpaced Macs by 11.4% to 5.1%. Apple still has plenty of room to grow however, with only 4.36% of the global computer market. via Fortune
MacBook makeovers bring new life to a couple of old laptops
Last weekend provided not one, but two opportunities for me to do some upgrades to some "old" MacBooks to bring 'em up to workable condition. To start with, one client of mine wanted to get rid of an unused MacBook, so I decided to purchase it from her as a machine for training. The other client had one of the original 15" Intel Core Duo MacBook Pros and doesn't want to spend the money on a new machine. In both cases, the machines were running older versions of Mac OS X, had insufficient RAM, and had hard drives that were both slow and small. The following post is a textbook example of how you can bring new life to slightly old Macs by just spending enough money to upgrade the memory, OS, and hard disk drive. For the MacBook, I decided that I wanted to max out its RAM, add more hard drive space, and speed up the hard drive while I was at it. I wanted to set up the machine with Mac OS X 10.6 and a Boot Camp partition running Windows 7, with an alternative external boot drive containing Mac OS X Server 10.6. The machine's initial setup: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (Penryn) CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a 160GB 5400 RPM SATA hard disk. I chose to max out the RAM to a total of 6GB, purchase a 500GB 7200 RPM drive for the internal drive, and procure a USB 2.0 bus-powered external shell for the existing drive. This MacBook was also running Mac OS X 10.5.8, and I wanted to update it to the latest version of Snow Leopard. Click "Read More" to find out how the upgrades went.
Analyst: Apple selling more iPads than Macs, at the moment
So there's no question that Apple is selling a ton of iPads, but would you have guessed that it's actually selling more iPads than all Mac sales combined? That's the case, at least at the moment, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky, who says that Apple is currently moving about 200,000 iPads per week, compared to 110,000 Macs -- though it still trails the iPhone, which is apparently racking up sales of 246,000 per week. Of course, we are just talking about analyst estimates here, and things could potentially swing back into the Mac's favor once the quarterly totals are added up. If true, however, it'd sure be a whopper of a milestone -- one that we'd no doubt be hearing plenty more about in, say, three weeks time.
NPD: Mac sales up 39 percent in January and Febuary as iPod sales rebound
Well, it looks like it's not just iPad pre-orders that are possibly be beating a few expectations -- according to NPD, sales of Macs and iPods were also up over some estimates in January and February. Citing the report, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says that sales of Macs were up 39% year over year for the two months (ahead of estimates of 22%), which should translate to sales of between 2.8 to 2.9 million Macs for the full quarter, while iPod sales were up 7% during the same period, suggesting total iPod sales of between nine and ten million for the first quarter. That latter number may actually be the more impressive of the two, as it marks the first time iPod sales have rebounded into positive territory in a full sixteen months -- although that trend could just as easily be reversed again if, say, Apple rolls out a new iPhone that cuts into iPod sales.
Gene Munster: 2010 is the "Year of the Mac," sales up significantly
When Gene Munster talks, people listen. The Piper Jaffray analyst delivered one of his missives this morning stating that his analysis of Mac retail sales in the U.S., based on numbers tracked by NPD Group, are up about 26% year-over-year for the December quarter. This is higher than the average Wall Street estimate of 19% year-over-year growth. What does that mean in terms of units sold? Munster, who is not pictured at right, believes that translates to about 3.1 million Macs sold in the U.S. last quarter. Munster's last estimate was for Apple to sell around 2.9 million Macs, so even his own estimates are turning out to be somewhat conservative. Munster believes that Street estimates for 2010 will need to come up. The Street shows about 14% year-over-year growth in Mac sales this year, which is well below the 20% or so growth that Apple is demonstrating. In his note, Munster wrote that "2010 is shaping up to be the year of the Mac." Munster concluded his note with a statement that he's confident in his estimate of 9.3 million iPhone shipments last quarter. We'll all find out for sure on Monday, when Apple reports the actual December quarter results. We'll liveblog the financial fun right here on TUAW, so stay tuned next week. [via Business Insider]
Apple beats Q2 estimates
Yesterday was Apple's Q2 financial conference call, and it's safe to say things went well. Apple generated $410 million (47 cents per share) in the 2nd quarter of 2006, up from $290 million (34 cents a share) as this time last year. Wall Street's projection was 43 cents per share. iPod sales continued to do well, and Mac sales rose 4%. I'm really interested to see the same numbers a year from now, once the full line of Macs are Intel-based and Leopard has been released.
