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news of 2004-11-29

Merrill Lynch: Apple will sell 4 mio. iPods this quarter

Steve Milunovich (of Merrill Lynch), today raised Apple's rating again. If you have Apple shares, don't sell them now. ;) If you don't have any, buy them the next time they're lower. But the most interesting part of the report: "iPods are being adopted faster than Sony Walkmans were [...]" - (However: I'm not so sure that you can compare the numbers directly, impressive as they may be.)

Also, UBS analyst Ben Reitzes said: "Over the weekend we surveyed several retailers nationwide and visited Apple stores in the New York area, noticing solid retail momentum for Apple." - UBS has increased its price target Apple Computer Inc. from 66 USD to 77 USD a share.

While the hype around Apple and the iPod certainly helps Apple selling even more iPods, Apple surely would like analysts to emphasise their iMacs more, because Apple's probably going to be out of iPods before christmas, anyway. ;)

[ written by fryke™ on 2004-11-29 at 22:03 CET ]
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I think: Steve Jobs doesn't like TV

And you might think why I think that. Well: The Mac's all about media of any type right? Desktop Publishing made the Mac big, Desktop Video once was Steve's new killer-application when introducing FireWire and the SuperDrive, music is also big on the Mac. Yet: Apple seems not a tiny bit interested in adding TV features to the Mac. Or will they?

How happy would I be, were Apple to release iSomething, a small box that connects to the Mac via FireWire and to the TV cable (and other input methods, probably), bringing TV to the Mac. Apple could surely create great software to go with it and has the technology (MPEG-4, H.264) to make archiving TV shows a great experience. Sure, there are third party solutions, but for the Mac, they are quite expensive. AFAIK, Apple could sell a simple TV tuner box accompanied by great software for 29 USD. If only they wanted. But, probably, Steve just doesn't like TV and thinks we should get out more (with an iPod, of course).

[ written by fryke™ on 2004-11-29 at 19:51 CET ]
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Gartner: 3 of 10 largest PC sellers will die before 2007

Yet they of course don't say which ones. ;) ... Which kinda leaves me asking: Does that include Apple? Or: What good is a prophecy like that, anyway? What if only two will vanish from the face of Earth? Will that mean Gartner was right to 66 percent? Well, let me put it this way: I say only two will die, and if only two will, does that mean I'm gonna be richer than Gartner by 2007? Probably not. Sometimes, headlines like the one commented here just make me angry. Sure, Gartner has probably put a lot of work into this and has analyzed a lot of data, but it just seems to be a wildly inaccurate business to create such predictions.

[ written by fryke™ on 2004-11-29 at 19:03 CET ]
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Planting Trees

Sounds like a title from the eighties or something. But this article on TheRegister about MS IE's security flaws is a new one, and it takes a look at how one would do more secure development, instead of how MS seems to be working. The article concludes: "The answer is simple: you follow basic best practices for security and never, ever divert from them." - Yet, Microsoft has been failing this principle for a long time. And now they're caught in a game that just doesn't seem to end, because of their past: It seems they'll always have inherently insecure code, which they'll try to keep up fixing.

Or to take another metaphor than the tree-planting one in the linked article: If you've spent more than a decade filling a house with - essentially - crap, what do you do? Sure, you could live in it and occasionally put some of the stuff to the trash when you need the space. But wouldn't you be better off cleaning the house and getting rid of everything you don't really need? In one version you continue to live in a very dirty and crap-filled house, in the other, you might have to move to a friend's house for a day or two but could live in a nice clean, comfortable house from then on. Sadly, Microsoft just won't do that, as far as I can see.

[ written by fryke™ on 2004-11-29 at 17:37 CET ]
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IBM/Sony/Toshiba to unveil Cell chip in February

TheRegister mentions that IBM and Sony are now 'ready to announce' the Cell-based workstation (which will be a rackmount server dedicated to the development of software, i.e. games, for the Playstation 3). The Cell processor, according to TheRegister's article, is a POWER derivate with three cores (every core can run a separate operating system) and AltiVec. TheReg poses the question, whether this chip could be interesting for Apple, too. We'll know more in February 2005.

[ written by fryke™ on 2004-11-29 at 12:25 CET ]
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