iSights.org

What's Apple's Mystery Product?

According to AppleInsider, Apple's chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer revealed that the company will make a key "product transition" that cuts back on its profit margins to help shut out rivals.

As such, the forums and chat rooms are busily dissecting each and every word and attempting to apply them to Apple's product line. Are we talking new MacBooks? New desktops? New iPods? What?

Personally, if Apple's serious, and if they REALLY wanted to take a crack at an aging product line with the highest price and fattest margins... I'd look at the Cinema Displays.

iPhone 3G Sales "In Perspective"

TechDirt is running an article placing iPhone sales "in perspective". Recent mobile handset numbers show that 282 million phones were sold in the first quarter of this year, and that Nokia alone appears to sell approximately 1.28 million handsets per day.

Mike concludes, "So, yes, selling 1 million handsets over the weekend is a nice round milestone -- and certainly other handset makers are probably jealous of the attention it's getting. But, it's not having a huge impact on the overall handset market just yet."

But let's compare Apple's to Apple's, shall we? According to Gartner, worldwide smartphone sales in 1Q 2008 totaled 32.2 million units, which would put the average daily sales of higher-end phones at roughly 358,000 units.

Or in other words, Apple sold -- singlehandedly, and per day -- almost as many smartphones over this weekend as all of the other manufacturer's combined.

Plus, if Apple meets its numbers of selling 10 million phones in 2008, they'll have gained roughly 10% of the entire worldwide smartphone market. Which, ignoring the low-end "free" handsets sold by Nokia and others, also just happens to be be the most profitable end of the market.

Just, of course, putting things into perspective...

Updated iPhone Applications Already Available

If you're one of those who purchased and downloaded iPhone applications over the weekend, you might want to check to see if your brand spanking new application has already been updated.

I did, and found that Cro-Mag Rally, BoxOffice, NetNewsWire, NYTimes, and World News NetWork (AP) were just a few of the applications that have already received bug fixes and updates since the App Store opened for business last Friday.

iPhone App Store Up To 800 Applications

If you browsed through Apple's new App Store on Friday and didn't see anything of interest you might want to look again. The number of applications listed has increased increased daily, going from Friday's original 535 to just over 800.

In related news, Apple has stated in a press release that they've sold 10 MILLION applications since Friday (or Thursday, for those of us who jumped the gun).

Undoubtedly, many of the applications "sold" were free, but 10 million of anything in three days has to be an impressive number in anyone's book.

iPhone Hackers Root Cause Of 3G Lines

The three and four hour long iLines of iCustomers waiting to get iPhones across the US arose from a perfect storm of three contributing factors.

First to shoulder their share of the blame are the consumers themselves, who got exactly what they demanded, and as such were effectively hoist on their own petard. More on that later.

Second was Apple's misguided decision to simultaneously release the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2G 2.0 software update on the same day.

Finally, the third portion of blame needs to be placed directly at the feet of the iPhone hacker community.

Most of it, actually.

iPhone Lines - We're Waiting, We're Waiting

From a marketing standpoint, Appe's decision to require in-store activations guaranteed long lines and the appearance of high consumer demand as loyal customers patiently awaited entry into their local store.

But when you're the one forced to stand in one of those lines while each and every phone sold goes through a fifteen minute activation process, it takes on an entirely different perspective.

And one completely different from the original "pay for it and you're out of here" process.

Apple can only hope that the future experience of owning and using the new 3G iPhone will wash away the memory of those wasted hours and the dissatisfaction of that decision.

BTW, this entry was generated during one of those wasted hours...

First iTunes App Store photo

The new App Store home page, available from iTunes 7.7.

Upgrade To iTunes 7.7 Before Buying iPhone 3G

The "App Store" upgrade from iTunes 7.6 to iTunes 7.7 is now available via Software Update.

In retrospect, it's obvious that iTunes 7.7 would be released before Apple shipped the iPhone 3G, as Apple's own instructions on upgrading from 2G to 3G require you to sync and backup your existing phone's settings, and then use that backup to "restore" your new 3G phone's settings.

And for that to work, you're going to need new software.

So if you're planning on moving up to a new 3G phone tomorrow you need to run, don't walk, to your Apple menu. From there run Software Update and then download iTunes 7.7. With that under your belt, you'll be set to install the iPhone 2.0 software update when it's released later today.

Install 2.0, then do your backup and you'll be ready to sync up your new iPhone 3G tomorrow.

It's unfortunate that Apple didn't allow more time between the release of 7.7 and 2.0 and the July 11th iPhone release date, but they didn't, so start downloading NOW.

One can only hope Apple's servers are up to the load...

[UPDATE] They weren't...