iPhone 3g to be in ample supply, but possible iPod Touch refresh suggest slowing down in production

Link to AppleInsider article

Apple should have ample stock of iPhone 3G when it touches down this month, according to analysts, who also note that Apple stands to make more from each device than once thought — and that iPod touch stocks are continuing to run down ahead of a possible refresh.

In his note to investors, Lehman Brothers analyst Ben Reizes cites sources which claim that Apple’s manufacturing schedule should be enough to satisfy much if not all of the initial demand on July 11th.

“iPhone build plans for June may be better than some had thought, which could mean that iPhone demand is met on July 11 with fewer shortages,” he says, maintaining that Apple will sell 3.6 million iPhone 3G devices in the summer and as much as 23 million for all of Apple’s fiscal 2009.

Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray adds that AT&T’s complete official pricing for iPhone 3G units suggests Apple is making more from the reportedly abundant iPhone stock than estimated in the past.

Although the $199 starting price is much lower for the customers themselves, the $599 month-to-month price hints that the carrier subsidy cuts much deeper and hides greater profits for Apple, which could be asking $500 for each iPhone versus an earlier estimate of $425.

“This discrepancy leads us to believe our [average selling price] is conservative,” Munster says.

A change of this level would boost Apple’s calendar 2009 revenue by eight percent, he adds. Reitzes also points out that steep drops in the prices of NAND flash memory could further help Apple’s bottom line by reducing the manufacturing costs of each iPhone.

Apple’s recognition of the iPhone’s popularity may also be playing into ongoing but small-scale iPod touch shortages, according to the analyst: stocks of 16GB iPod touch models at Best Buy have continued to drop in the past two weeks and have had less than three quarters of the retail stores carrying stock at any given time. Supplies of 8GB versions are also starting to decline, although once again Apple’s back-to-school deal is believed to be curbing Apple’s ability to maintain stock.

The Cupertino-based firm may be winding down stock as it prepares to reposition the iPod touch given the iPhone’s much lower price, Reitzes predicts. An update is expected by September.

He also notes that lead-times are starting to grow for Apple’s special-order 1.8GHz MacBook Air and 3.06GHz iMac computers, which now take between two to four business days to ship and are described as early signs that Apple is readying new MacBooks in time for back-to-school purchasing.

Both iPod and Mac sales are tracking above expectations for the spring, in part because of the halo effect of the iPod touch, according to the Lehman analyst.

Well, it would be interesting to see Apple make a 3g network capable iPod Touch, with a iPhone 3g like design. Though, next month, we might see Macbook Pro/iMac/iPod revisions. I’m personally getting both the Black and White 16gb versions(one for me, one for my lunatic wife), and I’m waiting in line from about 9 pm on the 10th.

Spamalot: A month of spam inlarges the inbox, but not your sex life.

Link to ArsTechnica Article

Back in April, McAfee launched an experiment designed as a tribute to Morgan Spurlock’s Super-Size Me documentary on eating nothing but McDonald’s food for 30 days. Instead of fast food, however, McAfee gathered a group of some 50 volunteers from Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Spain, the US, and the UK. Once this elite group of sacrificial goats brave souls had been assembled, McAfee put them on a diet of pure spam.

Related Stories

• Report: .hk TLD riskiest place to surf; .fi, .no, .jp safest

No, we’re not referring to the creamy mounds of whipped pig nestled inside a pop-top container—although 30 days of eating it might make an interesting experiment in and of itself—but the kind of spam that arrives via your inbox and tempts you with online degrees, job offers, free XBox 360s, and magnanimous gifts from your great-uncle Dmitri back in Russia.

McAfee ran its S.P.A.M. (Spammed Persistently All Month) campaign from April 1 to May 1. There don’t appear to be any official details of how the contest was run, but five UK participants in the program were asked to blog about their experience on a daily basis. Based on their early entries (available here), it seems that McAfee distributed new laptops to the group specifically for the purposes of the experiment. The volunteers then ran around the ‘Net on their own, signing up for free offers, new web sites, and all the other various goodies the bowels of the Internet purport to offer.

The five bloggers chose different initial approaches. Danielle started by googling for “free stuff,” Dan went for freebie funny clips, and Simon cut straight to the chase by hunting for Viagra. It didn’t take long for spam to start trickling in—multiple people report receiving spam within hours of registering at a site—and that trickle steadily grew into first a river and then a flood as the days passed. At the end of 30 days, Simon had collected 7,084 spam emails, Danielle had 2,131, and Vic was apparently just under 2,000. Simon’s decision to chase the Viagra market may not have done anything for his sex life, but it did substantially enlarge his inbox.

If you ever wanted concrete proof that the “Don’t share my information with other companies” and “Stop emailing me” options on a web site are often useless, it’s here. It’s impossible to know which companies share data and which don’t, but registering with the “do not share my e-mail” option ticked didn’t appear to reduce spam in any way. Some of the bloggers reported a drop in the amount of spam they were receiving on a day-to-day basis when they unsubscribed from certain services, but the trend is not particularly strong.

The BBC ran a story and interview with Leslie Finlayson, who participated in the experiment. She reports receiving 23,751 emails in three months (the official experiment was only 30 days long), despite the fact that she began unsubscribing to services as early as the second week of the test. As she states, “It would appear that reputable companies are selling on our e-mail addresses to less reputable companies, which then go along the line until you get this kind of rubbish coming through your inbox.”

McAfee’s experiment is an excellent example of how even the most basic safe surfing techniques can have a profound impact on a person’s overall “Internet experience.” Leslie received an average of 264 spam e-mails per day, while Simon followed at 236. Even 2,000 e-mails in 30 days equates to 67 per day, and that’s enough to be annoying. Keeping one’s e-mail address relatively private is a simple way to cut down on spam. Teaching Grandpa why punching the monkey is bad, however, could take some doing.

Spam

More businesses using Macs? Yes! 8/10 are!

Link to ComputerWorld article

June 26, 2008 (Computerworld) Nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the percentage that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago, a research firm said today.

“Then, we were talking about onesies and twosies,” said Laura DiDio, a research fellow at Yankee Group Research Inc. who conducted a survey of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives. “Now the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed.”

In early 2006, when DiDio last polled corporate IT professionals on Mac deployment, 47% said that they had Apple Inc. hardware in their environments.

DiDio was impressed with the growth of Macs in business, considering that Apple Inc. has put little to no official effort into that part of the market. “This isn’t a tidal wave, but it’s certainly a sustained trend,” she said. “Apple has a beachhead in business. Where it once had just 1-to-2% market share in corporate, now they’re up to 8-to-10%,” DiDio added.

Twenty-one percent of the firms surveyed reported that they had deployed more than 50 Macs. “This isn’t Mickey Mouse; it’s not just onesies and twosies anymore,” DiDio said. “Apple’s graduated into the big league.”

Among the reasons businesses cited for adopting Macs, the most surprising was the ability to virtualize other operating systems, primarily Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, on Mac hardware. “That’s clearly spurring some businesses,” DiDio said. “A number of the respondents said, ‘Oh, guess what, we’re using the Mac to load Vista or XP on there and using Mac hardware.”

More than a quarter of the firms surveyed — 28% — said that they are running Windows in a virtual machine on the Macs they have. Slightly fewer (22%) confirmed that their Macs are set up to boot either Windows or Mac OS X using the latter’s built-in dual-boot utility, Boot Camp.

DiDio called out virtualization software from Seattle-based Parallels and Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware Inc. as the tools enterprises are using to run non-Apple operating systems on Macintosh hardware. IT professionals noted that the reliability of Apple’s hardware was a factor in shifting to Macs. Almost eight out of 10 of the people surveyed rated Mac hardware reliability as either “excellent” or “very good.”

“There’s no doubt that user confidence in the reliability of both the Macintosh hardware and software products is having a tangible impact on corporate purchasing and deployment trends,” DiDio wrote in a draft of a report based on the survey that she will soon release.

Other enterprise IT administrators said they had gone virtual in an attempt to sidestep the management overhead required for Windows on physical PCs. “Many of our Windows developers have switched to XP and Vista virtual machines running on Macintosh hardware to circumvent the downtime they experienced with the unreliability — viruses, spyware, disruptive automatic updates — of Windows XP running on PCs,” one IT manager told DiDio in a follow-up interview.

But while businesses are willing to bring in Macs, there’s no indication that an appreciable number are considering swapping out current hardware for Apple’s across the board. “Some have a problem with the management tools [available for Mac OS X],” said DiDio. “The tools are lacking, and the enterprise hardware and software support is not equivalent to what’s available for Windows.”

Even so, other IT professionals have made the case that some of Mac OS X’s tools make up for the lack of management support. “All these tools that the Mac [OS X] has, like desktop search [with Spotlight], iChat and Time Machine make a very compelling case to install Mac,” she said.

“The difference now is that it’s much more concerted and formalized,” DiDio concluded, talking about current Mac adoption trends. “People are making the choice to go with Apple — not just to let it in, but that it’s a viable choice.”

New York Times: Windows could use a breath of fresh air-YA THINK?!

Link to New York Times Article

MICROSOFT Windows has put on a lot of weight over the years.

Beginning as a thin veneer for older software code, it has become an obese monolith built on an ancient frame. Adding features, plugging security holes, fixing bugs, fixing the fixes that never worked properly, all while maintaining compatibility with older software and hardware — is there anything Windows doesn’t try to do?

Painfully visible are the inherent design deficiencies of a foundation that was never intended to support such weight. Windows seems to move an inch for every time that Mac OS X or Linux laps it.

The best solution to the multiple woes of Windows is starting over. Completely. Now.

Vista is the equivalent, at a minimum, of Windows version 12 — preceded by 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, NT, 95, NT 4.0, 98, 2000, ME, XP. After six years of development, the longest interval between versions in the previous 22-year history of Windows, and long enough to permit Apple to bring out three new versions of Mac OS X, Vista was introduced to consumers in January 2007.

When I.T. professionals and consumers got a look at Vista, they all had this same question for Microsoft: That’s it?

Just after Vista’s birth, Kevin Kutz, a manager at Microsoft, issued a cranky statement in February 2007, “In Response to Speculation on Next Version of Windows,” announcing that the company could not say anything about post-Vista Windows “other than that we’re working on it.”

You think Windows could use a breath of fresh air? You’re right, but really, they need to, considering Bill Gates has left them.

Windows really needs to just completely scrap all of the NT bullshit that is the main underlying infrastructure of Vista, and just do a overhaul. Sadly, Windows 7 seems like so far, it is just going to be Vista, but for a more “Web 2.0″ experience, even going to try out touch capabilities they claim are new, when XP had the capability.

Microsoft needs to get their act together, now, not just on Windows, but by ditching the Zune, and improving the real money makers of Windows, Office, and the Xbox.

AT&T finally releases iPhone 3g info

Link to The Unoffical Apple Weblog article

AT&T Wireless has just posted official information about the iPhone 3G for US customers.

In addition to touting the iPhone 3G’s feature-set and a 3G-coverage tool, AT&T has officially clarified upgrade pricing for existing non-iPhone owning AT&T customers (as we covered a few weeks ago, current iPhone customers are automatically eligible to upgrade at the new $299 price).

If you are an AT&T customer who does not qualify for the upgrade pricing, you can get the 8 GB iPhone 3G for $399.99 and the 16 GB iPhone 3G for $499.99 — or a $200 premium. A two-year contract must still be signed.

AT&T has also announced that the iPhone 3G will be available at 8 a.m. on Friday, July 11, 2008 at AT&T retail stores.

Even more exciting — for the contract-averse among us — AT&T states:

“Coming soon, AT&T will offer a no-commitment option of $599 for 8GB and $699 for 16GB.”

AT&T has also bundled together the iPhone data plan (which is a requirement) and their voice plans in one manageable chunk.

Plans start at $69.99 for 450 anytime minutes, 5000 night and weekend, unlimited mobile-to-mobile and iPhone 3G data. AT&T’s unlimited voice plan including iPhone 3G service is $129.99. SMS text message bundles are available for $5 (for 200 messages a month), $15 (for 1500 messages a month) and $20 (for unlimited text messages) a month, or $0.20 per message.

AT&T even put together a handly iReady Checklist for new and old customers alike.

So, $700 for a no-commitment option for 16gb? Fuck you AT&T, now I’ll be sure to jailbreak it.

Mac OS X approaches 8 percent marketshare in June. Now lets try for 10!

Link to ArsTechnica Article

At 7.96 percent, Mac OS X will surely break 8 percent market share sometime this month, a gain of a third in just a year, and a truly astounding accomplishment for Apple. By platform, Intel Macs saw their numbers jump by a quarter of a percent to 5.26 percent, while PPC graybeards declined to 2.7 percent. For doomsayers grasping at upgraders to explain the gains, Intel Macs increased at twice the pace of decline for PPC Macs. The rapid decline of PPC Macs coupled with sharp gains for Intel Macs no doubt factored into the decision to make Snow Leopard Intel only. See, we did learn something from Net Applications, and it’s not the only thing.

Well, maybe by Snow Leopard, Apple will be at around 10 percent again. Maybe then we can get some decent games on the platform!

Stuff of the Day: I love the whole world, James motherfucking Bond

With that, I would also like you to know that I will be gone for the most part for the rest of the week. I have to leave for Ohio early tomorrow morning, and I will also be covering Bungie Day (7/7) and then the iPhone 3g launch. Oh, and I might be at PAX.

Because 2

Stuff of the Day: Ooops, Fishing Ball, I love Jamies mustache, The way the French ends.

Bill Gates retired today. Congrats, no, really.

Link to Reuters article

REDMOND, Washington (Reuters) - Bill Gates said a teary goodbye on Friday to Microsoft Corp, the software maker he built into the world’s most valuable technology company based on the ambitious goal of placing a computer on every desk and in every home.

He leaves his full-time executive role at Microsoft, which he co-founded with childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975, to focus on his philanthropic organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest charity, funded in part by his vast fortune.

At an event at Microsoft’s headquarters campus here, Gates, who will become a non-executive chairman and work part-time, joined Chief Executive Steve Ballmer on stage to deliver a short speech and field questions from employees.

“There won’t be a day in my life that I’m not thinking about Microsoft and the great things that it’s doing and wanting to help,” said Gates, who wiped away tears as the group of employees rose to give him a standing ovation.

Ballmer, a Harvard University classmate who joined Microsoft at Gates’ behest, got choked up as he tried to describe Gates’ impact on the company and society at large.

“There’s no way to say thanks to Bill. Bill’s the founder. Bill’s the leader,” said Ballmer. “We’ve been given an enormous, enormous opportunity and it was Bill that gave us this opportunity.”

Gates will leave behind a life’s work developing software to devote energy to finding new vaccines or to microfinance projects in the developing world. He will still work on special technology projects at the company.

Once the world’s richest man, Gates’ personal fortune has been estimated at about $58 billion, according to Forbes Magazine. He has slipped to third place, behind investor and good friend Warren Buffett and Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim.

ONE BILLION AND COUNTING

Ballmer spoke about how he contemplated quitting Microsoft a month after joining the company and returning to Stanford University business school. Bill passionately implored him to stay and laid out the vision of the company.

“This is what Bill said to keep me. ‘You don’t get it! You don’t get it! You don’t get it! We’re going to put a computer on every desk and in every home,’” said Ballmer.

There are currently more than one billion PCs worldwide, according to research firm IDC.

Gates and Ballmer recalled the many steps Microsoft took to evolve from a fledgling start-up to a company of more than 90,000 employees making everything from video game consoles to computer software.

The pair remembered the battles with computer industry titan International Business Machines Corp’s, an early partner turned rival when it rolled out a competing operating system to Microsoft’s flagship software, Windows.

“We went toe to toe with the biggest, most powerful computer company in the world and we beat them,” said Ballmer.

The 52-year-old Gates said the company had made “a mistake” not recognizing earlier how Web search and online advertising — businesses dominated by another start-up turned powerhouse, Google Inc — could transform the software industry.

However, he cautioned skeptics not to count out Microsoft.

“I love that kind of thing where people are underestimating Microsoft,” said Gates. “Yes, we make mistakes and we know it, but we come back and learn from those things. A lot of our best work is the result of that.”

After 33 years, Gates said he sometimes finds himself lost in thought, driving to Microsoft without realizing it. He also said he will move out of his corner office — making way for Ballmer — into a smaller area one floor below.

“I am sure there will some day next month where I start thinking about software and I will start driving here to Microsoft, go up to the fifth floor and walk down to my office and they will be remodeling it,” said Gates with a chuckle.

“In fact, they were wondering if I was leaving at four or five today, so they could get started on that.”

See you later Bill. Even though you are still someone I wouldn’t want to touch with a 10 foot pole (same goes with Jobs, since he would yell at me for it not being an iPole), congrats. Microsoft won’t be the same without you (since you hold the company together, like Jobs with Apple, and since you seem to be the only one there with a brain), and you were one of the few people, that without you, we would still be using something like BIOS and DOS.

Happy retirement, Gates.