Mac Beating Market Ping!
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Posted on 05/20/2008 10:07:59 AM PDT by Swordmaker
The blistering success of Apple's personal computer business continues to turn heads, with Mac unit sales growing 50 percent year-over-year for the month of April compared to just 17 percent growth by the broader market.
Mac revenues were also up sharply at 46 percent, according to the most recent data from market firm NPD Group, as cited Monday by Lehman Brothers analyst Ben Reitzes in a noted distributed privately to clients.
The rapid growth in April suggests the Cupertino-based company is in good position to report upside to Reitzes' current estimate of 37 percent Mac growth for the three-month period ending June.
Meanwhile, a similar set of data from NPD covering iPods reveals that sales of the media players were up 15 percent in units and 10 percent in dollar sales during April, compared to a rise of 12 percent in units and 4 percent in revenues for the overall market.
"We continue to believe our estimate of a 2 percent year-over-year unit decline in iPods could prove conservative; although year-over-year weekly growth rates have decelerated in May," Reitzes said.
In his note to clients, the Lehman analyst also reiterated his belief that Apple will introduce an updated line of Mac notebooks in time for the back-school season that heats up in the July time frame, which will include redesigned MacBooks, MacBook Pros and more MacBook Airs.
"Checks are indicating that the attractive look of the Air may make its way into other models in terms of slimmer, metallic designs," he said. "We believe these notebooks will be popular for the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons."
Apple remains the analyst's "top pick" in the IT hardware space. He rates the company's shares as "Overweight," or outperforming those of its similarly situated peers over the next 12 months, with a price target of $202.
hmm, got my quadcore Dell yesterday....smoking!
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What is Vista? The best thing to ever happen to Apple.
Time to hit Apple with a windfall profits tax.
I just bought my wife an iMAC to replace her aging PC. After about 10 minutes of playing with it myself - I want one too!
I've had a Dell Lappy and just got a Mac Book Pro.
The Dell with Vista feels like a Yugo compared to the seamlessness of the Mac OS and it's hardware.
Congratulations on the purchase of your new V8-engined Chevette. :D
I inherited a G3 MAC. Will it run OSX and what version should I get?
The answer is that it will run OSX but to know which version I need to know the speed of the processor and the amount of RAM installed. You can check this data by clicking on the Apple Menu on the left of the menu bar and selecting "About this Mac."
Also, what model is your G3? PowerPC Tower? iMac? iBook? Powerbook?
It’s a power PC tower with the plastic case like an Imac but in the shape of a tower.
I’ve got a question for the Mac users: How easy is it to integrate Mac’s into a Windows Server based office LAN? I’m sick of messing with Windows and all its hangups but I’m also concerned about creating even more problems if I start replacing my PC’s with Macs one at a time.
We just got our new iMac w/the 24 inch screen! AMAZING!!!!!!
Do you suppose Jobs designed Vista and somehow suckered Ballmer into introducing it?
I've had no problems at all tapping into various Windows networks.
The ‘Hello I’m a Mac’ commerical is a great ad.
It is very easy unless you’re running in a severely locked-down Active Directory environment. Then not all of the Windows Server features are available to you.
I have a 3 year old 1.33Ghz powerPc G4 with 512 MB DDR SDRAM. Can I add memory myself and will it help speed things up?
Ibook
Got a Macbook Pro (already had Dell desktop and Dell portable) and all you have to do is turn it on and if you have a wireless router, enter your wireless encryption code and it’s done.
The secret to setting up MAC is “..if you don’t know what to do, to what you would like it to need you to do.” Nearly always works!
Seriously, no problem. Just set up which folders/files you want to share, passwords, etc., and it flys. I started with OSX 10.5 (Leopard) so don’t know about older OSX.
The MAC OS includes Samba built-in so no problem interacting with Windows, at least not with XP. I never got Vista.
I would love to switch my laptop to a Mac, but I have some software that is windows only and one windows program that I HAVE to have for work that needs access to the internet and LAN, is it possible to run Windows programs inside of OS X? Or do you have to do the Bootcamp thing?
It integrates seamlessly, but group policy won't do much since AD doesn't know much about what's in a Mac to control. There is a third-party tool that will let you do it though.
I'm not sure "integrates seamlessly" is quite accurate. Will the Mac recognize Windows security principals? There's more to joining a Windows domain than group policy.
Yes. There are a couple of virtual machine options. One is Parallels and another is VMWare. Both will let you run Mac and Windows (and UNIX, if you want) at the same time. Bootcamp requires a reboot into the otehr OS, but in Parallels, you an cut and paste between OS's. The only limit is how much HD space do you want to devote to another OS partition. Either option requires a full copy of Windows, though.
Yikes, I sold yesterday.
Yes. Active Directory security principals are Kerberos. Apple also uses Kerberos.
Recognizing the security principals means the it can accept Windows security tokens and grant or deny access based on ACEs based on the SIDs of those tokens, and can present it's own security tokens when accessing resources on other machines.
Can I grant or deny access to that computer or the data on it's hard drive based on a domain user or machine SID, or membership in a domain security group, for either a local logon or remote access to the system over the wire?
You can run Windows from inside OS X via Parallels:
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/?from=homepage
Thnaks for the NFO, I’ll take a look at it.
Doug
Sword, hear anything on MacAir storage upgrades? 80GB is a bit light for me. I see there are 160GBs in iPods these days.
I love the recent one where Windows sings and plays the guitar, and as he finishes the last words of the songs, the bloodhound howls.
That. Cracks. Me. Up.
You said security principals. That's Kerberos talk.
Can I grant or deny access to that computer or the data on it's hard drive based on a domain user or machine SID, or membership in a domain security group, for either a local logon or remote access to the system over the wire?
Now you're talking group policy again, and I've covered that.
Last I heard they could only fit a 1-platter 1.8” hard drive in it. No room for the thicker 2-platter 160 GB.
Very well. What term would you prefer that refers to a Windows domain object that can be referenced by it's security identifier (SID)?
Now you're talking group policy again, and I've covered that.
I don't consider that part of group policy. I don't have to have group policy to set domain based permissions on a Windows workstation. I only need group policy to managae it centrally. Can I set file permissions on a Mac based on membership in a Windows domain security group?
Given that Windows uses Kerberos, the name you used is appropriate.
I only need group policy to managae it centrally.
Then we're talking about the same thing. I've already said that what you can do natively is limited (I don't expect AD to know all the other systems, and vice-versa), but there are third-party tools that let you micromanage a Mac through group policy (or not through group policy if you're a masochist).
Can a Mac format a hard drive with NTFS?
Of course the first question is "Why the hell would you want to do that?" But if you have an NTFS partition on the drive OS X will read it, not write (there is third-party support for writing). A return question, will Windows natively read/write/format an HFS+ Extended (Journaled) partition? Hint: no, can't even recognize it. BTW, can Windows read ZFS?
Yes and yes. Is this a tower or a laptop? Upgrades for the desktop are less expensive and easier to find and install, but the laptop isn't too difficult.
Because if it's NTFS, it will let me use Windows domain SIDS to set access control entries in the file system, and control the access to the file system using Windows domain accounts and groups.
I don't think it's accurate to say that the MAC will "seamlessly integrate" into a Windows domain (except for group policy) when you can't even use domain security to set file permissions on the local hard drive. This is something you could do in NT4, before there ever was an Active Directory or group policy.
I haven't seen any upgrades. It's worth noting that the Air isn't a desktop replacement -- it's best used as an extension of a desktop computer. For a primary machine, the MacBook Pro or even the MacBook is probably a better fit.
I have parallels at home, haven’t really played with it yet. The distribution CD was bad, and it went downhill from there.
I want to give this a shot also: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/
Ibook
Aha. The 1.33GHz iBook uses PC2100 for the 14”, PC2700 for the 12”. It runs about $40 for a 1GB module, the most you can add, according to dealram.com.
To install a RAM module, you need to pull the keyboard up, and remove the AirPort card and a small metal shield. If you’re comfortable opening up computer cases at all, it shouldn’t be too tough (watch those fiddly little tables and don’t lose the tiny screws). Step-by-step instructions at http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/ .
Crossover isn’t bad for the apps it’s set up to support, but it’s not a full Windows environment.
Pro: You don’t need a Windows license ($$$), and you take less of a performance hit than with Parallels (which isn’t too bad itself). It has a far smaller RAM, processor and hard drive footprint than a full-blown Windows VM.
Con: Apps like Web browsers run just fine, but installing and upgrading plug-ins on those browsers was a little wonky when I tried it in an early version. Some apps simply aren’t supported. Custom apps for work are going to be hit or miss.
If Crossover meets your needs, it would be my first pick. But it does have some distinct limitations. I had a spare XP Pro license, so I went with Parallels. I haven’t tried VMWare.
Another option, if you’re switching to a Mac and will still have the PC, is to stick the PC somewhere out of the way and use Remote Desktop to run it from the Mac. You get full native speed in Windows, except that the I/O is limited by the network (no real-time games, obviously).
Thanks a ton for the advice and the link!
That matters if Windows is directly accessing a file system. In this case, the Mac is accessing the file system according to set permissions using ACLs. It will go by who the user is in LDAP (both Microsoft's Active Directory and Apple's Open Directory are implementations of the same LDAP standard). As Microsoft has been more fully supporting the LDAP standard in releases of Active Directory, interoperability has been getting better.
Does the machine itself maintain an account in the directory, change it's password periodically, and use those credentials to establish a secure channel to the other Windows computers in the domain?
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