Trends | Mac Sage

Apple iPad

by patrick

The iPad? Really, Steve?

That is one epically bad choice of names. I over-heard one female colleague suggest that it may be the first pad that most males won’t feel ashamed to purchase. I’m not sure that I’m convinced…

Apple is making a bold statement about the viability of micro-niches with the iPad. Wedging open the position between the iPhone and the MacBook, Apple seems to want to take on the NetBook and Kindle markets in one fell swoop. One elegant and well-thought-out swoop.

The iPad hits most of the major sweet spots for such a device. It has the horse-power, the graphics capabilities, the form-factor, the user-interface, the extant 150K+ apps ready to go, the iBook Store, the provocative price-points, and Apple’s legendarily elegant industrial design and marketing prowess.

One would have to be a fool to bet against the iPad’s game-changing success.

Only one thing has irked my ire in regard to the iPad:

3-month wait

Oh, well, maybe also the name. Steve, call me next time you need to brainstorm product names, ok?

MacWorld 2009, A Somber Crowd

by patrick

I expected a change in mood for this year’s MacWorld, and that is what I found.

First came the news that this would be a Steve-less MacWorld. Then, Apple announced that this would be their last year at the event. This double sucker punch to Mac fans couldn’t help but change the normally happy and excited event to a somber and dour chore.

Well, ok, it wasn’t quite that bad, but the crowds were way down this year. The MacWorld Expo folks tried to minimize the poor turnout by cleverly pushing in the dividing curtains on either side of both halls to make it seem fuller. Many vendors were saying that booth sales were sharply down.

I’m hoping that these changes are merely signs of an Apple evolution. Perhaps now, with so many Apple Stores around the country, Apple no longer needs the exposure and display area that MacWorld once provided. Maybe Apple no longer needs the MacWorld events to showcase new product announcements. And just maybe, Apple will be announcing their new products more frquently.

I’m still waiting for the new, more powerful Mac Mini, a new AppleTV, and the Kindle-killing large iPod-like device for reading electronic books.

As for MacWorld 2010, if enough vendors sign on to showcase their cool products, I’ll be there.

Macs Now Found in 8 of 10 Businesses

by patrick

A new survey conducted by Yankee Group Research Inc. of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives revealed that nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house. This number is up from the last survey in 2006 which indicated that 47% of businesses had in-house Macs.

Two interesting details of this survey are:

21% of the firms surveyed reported having delpoyed more than 50 Macs (some ranged into the thousands)
28% of the firms reported running Windows in a virtual machine on the Macs

Clearly, virtualization software has helped catalyze this trend towards Mac delpoyment. The two leaders in virtualization software are VMware Inc. (their product is Fusion) and Parallels.

In business and in education, there is an increasing trend towards making the Mac the platform of choice. The one unfortunate side-effect from this trend may be the increased (although minimal) exposure of the Mac OS to hackers’ efforts.