<IT WORLD> Apple king of the jungle
By Martin J Young
HUA HIN, Thailand - Tech giant Apple showed it is as juicy as ever by
announcing record revenues for its fourth quarter. Strong sales of iPhones and
iPads helped to drive profits to US$4.31 billion, up from $2.53 billion a year
earlier, as total sales surged 67% to $20.34 billion from $12.21 billion.
IPads notched up 4.2 million sales, while the ever-popular IPhone came in at
14.1 million. The iPod was the only product that showed a fall in demand,
possibly due to integration of the same media player into the iPhone.
The iPhone is now sold in 89 countries through 166 carriers - on the final day
of the quarter China started selling the iPhone 4 through China Unicom, which
claims to have shifted over 100,000
units
within the first four days.
Chief
executive Steve Jobs was upbeat about the figures
and had a customary dig at rivals Google and
Research In Motion (RIM), stating that the
former's Android software was too fragmented
(which sounded more like a closed versus open
source argument) and that the latter's BlackBerry
smart phone couldn't compete with the estimated
300,000 apps in the Apple's App Store.
The
two companies wasted no time with their responses.
RIM co-chief executive Jim Balsillie said "We
think many customers are getting tired of being
told what to think by Apple." Google vice
president of engineering Andy Rubin - a former
Apple engineer who went on to found Android -
posted a rather cryptic piece of code on Twitter
that suggests anyone can download and adapt the
platform to suit their needs.
Despite the
rosy looking figures, and the sniping between
rivals, Apple's results carried a small blemish in
the form of a decline in gross profit margins,
disturbing investors slightly and pulling down the
company's share price slightly although the
general outlook towards the company remains
positive.
Riding the week's momentum,
Apple also released a new model of MacBook Air,
the wafer-thin netbook that fits between the iPad
and more powerful MacBook Pro.
The new
11.6 inch model starts at US$1,000 and comes
equipped with a 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, two
gigabytes of memory, 64 gigabytes of flash
storage, and Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics
accelerator. On the down side it only has 2 USB
ports, no SD card slot, no HDMI, and no network
port, making it rather pricey when compared with
equally, and often higher, specification laptops
such as the Acer Aspire.
A new version of
OS X called Lion was also unveiled at the company
conference this week. It is expected to offer a
sleeker more iPad-like experience and is due to
ship in the middle of next year. "Lion brings many
of the best ideas from iPad back to the Mac, plus
some fresh new ones like Mission Control that Mac
users will really like," Jobs told a gathering of
Apple aficionados.
Consumers will be able
to integrate and upgrade to the new software and
hardware with all of the other devices within
their Apple-sphere - but may struggle with ones
not made by the Cupertino-based company, which is
exactly what Jobs and co want so as to ensure
those profitable figures keep improving.
Software In an effort to keep up
with the runaway train known as Google, Microsoft
has launched its own cloud-based solution to
compete with Google Apps. Office 365 is a
web-based version of the Office productivity suite
that includes e-mail. It will be available for $72
per year compared with $50 for Google's word
processing and spreadsheet offerings.
Historically, Office has been one of the
company's primary bread winners, so pushing it
into the clouds and offering subscriptions could
be seen as a risky maneuver. Yet the move is
essential if Microsoft want to keep pace with
Google, which is leading the way in cloud
computing with new services emerging almost every
week.
Internet One third of the
world’s population will be online by the end of
the year, according to The International
Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency of the
United Nations. It said the number of people
online has doubled to 2 billion in the past five
years, and two thirds of this year's new 226
million users have come from developing countries.
Connectivity in the developed world still
far exceeds that in the developing: 71% of people
in developed countries will be online by the end
of 2010 and only 21% in developing countries. The
Central African Republic is the most expensive
place to get online, with a fixed broadband
connection costing up to 40 times the average
monthly salary, and Macau is the cheapest, at a
cost of 0.3% of the average monthly income.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online
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