We told you that today’s earnings would be thin on iPhone details and that is definitely the case. Apple’s just posted their 3rd quarter results and the results are: dizzang!
Dig the full results (minus the legal speak) after the break. Here’s the short version: a record number of Macs were sold, just shy of 2.5 million, which works out to about 41% growth year over year, 43% revenue growth. That’s ALottaMacs, friends, and it helped Apple hit a quarterly profit of over a billion dollars on $7.46 billion in revenue — both significant increases over the same quarter last year. Margins were down a hair, but whatev — Apple’s selling Macs, dig?
We can’t wait to see what the financial results are for iPhone sales (they’ll come next quarter), but we have a sneaking suspicion that numbers like these mean that the just-dandy sales for iPhones 2 quarters ago have translated into quite a few people getting interested in replacing a PC with a Mac. As Mac-users ourselves, we welcome you folks to the fold. Are you a recent switcher? Was it the Halo effect? Is your new iPhone 3G spotting a shiny halo that has you thinking Mac for your next purchase?
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MacRumors is reporting that tonight’s financial results from Apple aren’t going to contain a whole lot of crunchy iPhone goodness. The news is based on a Bloomberg report that points out that Apple’s last quarter ended before the iPhone 2.0 software update was available, Apple doesn’t count those sales towards revenue. Likely if they had, they might have had to go all Sarbanes-Oxley on us and charge for that update. That might be fine for iPod owners, but iPhone owners have had enough of hidden costs lately.
The lack of iPhone info doesn’t look to put much of a damper on the earning call, though, as the high-margin Mac has been selling quite well (especially in laptop form). If you still want to listen in for that, Apple has a webcast set up for 5pm Eastern.
So I ventured out to an Apple Store yesterday hoping that since the iPhone 3G was a couple days old that I could easily grab one. No, not for me. For the girlfriend and my sister. I could have gone to the AT&T store only a few blocks away but whenever Apple releases a new product I prefer the full Apple experience at an Apple Store (Brea, CA); it’s just more complete that way. Expecting to get some hands on time with the iPhone 3G and pick up the Macbook Air again, I was pretty excited to get to the store.
As I cheerily walked through the mall eagerly anticipating the iPhone 3G, I stopped dead in my tracks. There was at least a 100-person line that stretched multiple storefronts! The Apple Store Employee ‘in-charge’ estimated the line to be a 5-hour wait! This was a Monday afternoon, didn’t people have work to do?
But it gets better (read: worse).
Read on for the rest of this very weird Apple Store Experience!
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MacRumors has discovered that though you receive your MobileMe email very quickly, the “pushing” of other MobileMe services is not as fast when coming from your Mac. Apple’s knowledgebase article states:
Selecting Automatic in Mac OS X allows your computer to immediately sync and update when there are any changes on the MobileMe servers. Those changes can come from your iPhone, iPod touch, the MobileMe website, or another computer. Changes made on your computer will be synced to the MobileMe “cloud” once every 15 minutes (or every hour in Mac OS X 10.4.11).
Automatic is not so automatic anymore. You can always manually sync your calendar, contacts and bookmarks, but if you leave it alone, it could take as long as 15 minutes to receive your updates on your device.
I have personally not experienced this. Even when I change information on my Mac (specifically iCal), I received the updates in a matter of minutes. I suppose this could have been because my scheduled 15 minute sync was about to happen, but I really have not noticed that much of a delay over all.
What do you think? Is this really that big of a deal? Should Apple’s push services be realtime from your Mac?
This is it. We’re in the home stretch. Games in overtime, the shot clock is almost done, and Steve Jobs is soaring from mid-court looking for the slam dunk. In 3 days we find out if Apple brings down the net, the two-peat for smartphone (even gadget) championship, or if they bounce it off the rim (pun sorta intended) with their mostly evolutionary, not so much revolutionary, next generation handset.
Saturday we mentioned one big change: the fast 3G data chip. Sunday it was GPS. Monday we tackled the 2.0 Firmware update. Today we’re looking at the rebirth of .Mac: MobileMe.
Note: .Mac users have been able to send to username@me.com for a few days already, and as of yesterday, July 7, could both send and receive using me.com. (Just tried it out and it works!)
Now word comes that, to accommodate New Zealand, which due to their time zone gets the iPhone 3G way before anyone else, Apple has announced that it’s really not 3 days to MobileMe — just one! That’s right, MobileMe goes live on Wednesday, July 9 between 6pm and 12am PST. Mark your calendars, then get ready to “push” sync them!
Why should you want to? Read on after the break!
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.Mac has been up and down again over the last few days, which is nothing new, but this time it seems like the transition to MobileMe might actually have begun. Some people are reportedly able to receive mail at the me.com version of their alias (meaning name@mac.com is already mapping to name@me.com for some).
I just tried it, and received an “illegal alias” error for my trouble. Is it working yet for you?
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Woke up this morning and as per my usual modus operandi, checked mail on my iPhone and then went to read some feeds. That’s when it happened, mobile.mac.com (the interceptive RSS reading feature on MobileSafari) came back with a server error.
Seems to be working for me again, but reports have since sprung up of others having trouble with web-bound services of .Mac (though email protocols seems fine).
Server problems round Infinite Loop way? Transitions to MobileMe hitting some speed bumps? Karmic revenge for us knocking the RIM NOC again?
My guess is the road to MobileMe will be a wild ride, server side…
During the 2008 WWDC Keynote today, Apple VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, confirmed the rumors of a .Mac maga-revamp in the form of MobileMe.
Apple’s answer both to previous critiques of the admittedly out-dated .Mac service, and the expected cloud computing boom (see Android, Google), MobileMe features ActiveSync-like “push” email, calendar, and contacts syncing between your iPhone (or iPod Touch) and your Mac or PC, or via any web browser with some pretty spectacular looking Web 2.0/AJAX style online apps. It also adds photo syncing, clearly targeting consumers.
iDisk (the online storage service) gets a bump to 20GB, and goes fully online as well. Mac user? Still enjoy the Mac sync, iWeb, and Back-to-my-Mac that you know (and I) love.
Launching in July in time for the new iPhone 3G, and priced at the same $99 as .Mac, it still smacks the expensive, but if your don’t have Exchange, and value highly polished syncing and web-based solutions, this might just be the service for you.
Existing .Mac customers will be rolled into MobileMe — see Apple’s migration page for details — with a choice of maintaining their old @mac.com address, or the new @.me equivalent.
For more, go to me.com (which will redirect you to Apple.com/MobileMe), where a handy-dandy MobileMe guided tour awaits!
We’ve gone over just how bad the Mobile Me brand sounds to us a couple of times already (almost as bad as this week’s service!), but now reports surface that there may just be something better hidden beneath the bad label:
MobileMe is slated to include a host of new features, which we alluded to early in May; in addition, there will be new web interfaces for all aspects of MobileMe — calendars will look just like iCal, Contacts will look just like they do in Address Book, etc. This is similar to the way .Mac Webmail works today, though we’ve heard that the new interfaces will be much snazzier (yes, that’s a technical term).
Delivery estimate? Late June/July timeframe, hooking into the iPhone 2.0 and not only the newly released OS X 10.5.3, but potentially Windows as well.
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Yesterday came word that the name Apple might be using to rebrand .Mac was “Mobile Me”, and amid the pitchforks, torches, and angry villagers storming the internet pipes to Cupertino, we figured our readers could easily come up with a better name, and sweetened the pot with $50 worth of gift card incentive to prove it.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber had previously mentioned that iMobile might be an alternative, though his readers felt it could too easily be mistaken for immobile, probably not the poetry Steve Jobs is shooting for.
Now Gruber, and his handy crowd-source at Twitter bring word that just plain old “Me”, surfaced as me.com, could be a candidate as well, and had mysteriously changed ownership just today.
Make of that what you will (and I will continue to make fun, for the same reasons mentioned in the first post). And don’t forget to enter our contest. Pick a better name than “Mobile Me”, and if the blog staff likes your name best, the $50 gift certificate is yours! [We'll compile the guesses from this and from our previous post. The Gift Card is for the Phone different Accessory store. Deadline: 4EST on Monday June 2nd].
[From Dieter: I dislike this whole "me" thing for several reasons. First, it smacks of a 1990's, by-committee branding that sounds hip and clever but is actually staid and out-of-touch. Very Un-Apple. Second: If Apple somehow manages to make this brand hip and the "Me" does make people feel like they have ownership and identity with the brand ("Me.com really is about ME. Gosh, it's like it's my very own internet service,") then they'll be faced with an impossible task: not screwing that up. Think about how unhappy you are with .Mac's reliability and speed. Now imagine if that service weren't called ".Mac" but instead "Me." People will become disenamoured very quickly. Now we can obviously assume that this whole Me.com thing will have better reliability -- but if Apple really is looking for a straight-out, bald-faced "this is Me on the internet" branding, then even the tiniest failure in the system is going to make people super pissed -- it would go from "Aw crap, .Mac sucks again" to "Me.com is down again. Apple broke ME". Not good.
Thirdly: Windows ME. 'nuff said.]
