Tuesday, June 7, 2011
WWDC by the numbers (Updated)
WWDC by the numbers (Updated): "
Apple kicked off WWDC in a big way with 5,200 attendees who snagged all the tickets in a mere two hours. Unlike previous years, Jobs dove right into Mac OS X Lion without his traditional summary of the amazing things Apple has done. We watched the live stream like a hawk and gleaned out the pertinent stats that show how well Apple is performing across its product groups. Here's what we learned from Jobs and company:
54 million Mac users worldwide
Mac grew 28% while PC market shrank 1%
Mac sales are 73% notebooks, 27% desktops.
Mac App Store is now the #1 PC software channel over Best Buy and Walmart
Pixelmator made $1 million in its first 20 days, quadrupling its revenue.
over 200 million iOS devices sold
more than 44% of installed mobile user base
25 million iPads in first 14 months
15 billion songs sold in the iTunes store
#1 music retailer in the world
iBookstore downloads topped 130 million; six publishers on board
425,000 apps in the App Store; 90,00 are for the iPad
14 billion apps downloaded from the App Store
Apple paid out more than US$2.5 billion to devs
225 million iTunes accounts
50 million Game Center users
iPhone 4 is number two camera, not just smartphone camera, but camera on Flickr
Not too shabby for a company long considered the underdog.
WWDC by the numbers (Updated) originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Jun 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Doing the Math: At $29.99, Mac OS X Lion was WWDC's most expensive product
Doing the Math: At $29.99, Mac OS X Lion was WWDC's most expensive product: "
Our own Dave Caolo pointed out something that took the rest of the TUAW team aback: at US$29.99, Mac OS X Lion was the most expensive product discussed at WWDC today. It's not as though the next version of the Mac's operating system had a lot of pricing competition at the keynote. iOS 5 will be a free upgrade to users with supported hardware, and iCloud's services -- which used to cost $99/year under MobileMe -- are all completely free. In fact, other than Lion itself, the only thing Apple announced at WWDC that costs anything at all was iTunes Match at $25 a year.
One of the major anti-Apple memes over the lifetime of the Mac has been that Apple's products are far more expensive than those of its competitors. While there are arguments both for and against that line of thinking for Macs and equivalently-configured PCs, the iPad's pricing compared to other tablets' blows that argument out of the water, and Apple's software prices undercut those of Windows by an astonishing margin, as demonstrated in the graphic above.
Windows 7 comes in a spread of flavors, while Mac OS X Lion comes in only two: the standard $29.99 user edition and an upgraded server edition that costs $50 more. Both will be downloads from the Mac App Store, and while there's no official word yet, based on a cursory reading of the current terms and conditions, it seems that both Lion and Lion Server Edition will be installable on up to 10 machines associated with a user's iTunes account.
So our graphic is wrong in one sense: while you could buy multiple copies of Lion for the same price as the equivalent Windows software, you don't actually have to. If anything, this makes Lion an even more economical prospect than Windows. Even if you want to make the argument that it'd take a Server Edition upgrade to put Lion's feature set on parity with Windows 7 Ultimate Edition (an assessment with which we'd politely disagree), Windows 7 is still only installable on one machine. Therefore, even with 'Lion Server Edition' costing a total of $80, that's $80 for a 10-machine license under the current terms and conditions versus $220 to install Windows 7 Ultimate Edition on one.
Put another way: for the amount of money you'd pay for a single-machine license for Windows 7 Ultimate Edition, you could install Mac OS X Lion and its server tools on 20 machines and still have 60 bucks left over. If you're like us and you think Lion doesn't need the server tools to be on parity with Windows 7 Ultimate, you could install Lion on 70 machines and buy yourself a six-pack for the same price as one Windows 7 Ultimate license.
Apple charged $129 for Mac OS X Leopard and older iterations of its operating system, which were still considered bargains against the pricing of equivalent Windows packages. But Lion's incredibly low cost compared to that of Windows merely demonstrates what we've known all along: Apple is, at its heart, a hardware company. It makes money off of its hardware, but the only purpose of the software is to make the hardware sing. iTunes? Free. iCloud? Free. iOS? Free. Mac OS X? 30 bucks.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is primarily a software company dependent on hardware makers to run its software. Xbox 360 and some minor pilot projects aside, Microsoft makes an overwhelming majority of its money off licenses of Windows and Office editions. With that in mind, it's little wonder that Microsoft's software costs so much more... or that Apple is currently cleaning Microsoft's clock financially.
Doing the Math: At $29.99, Mac OS X Lion was WWDC's most expensive product originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Jun 2011 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Run Across America with Dean Karnazes
Here is the link to the official blog post about our 5K run with Dean Karnazes in Goddard, KS on March 31, 2011. You can spot Cherie and I in some of the pictures, especially the group shot that I have included here. It was a great time, and a great joy to get the opportunity to run side-by-side with Dean! Relentless Forward Motion, Dean! Go Karno!
(click to enlarge)
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Back on top...
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Steamboat Ski For All
Tomorrow we plan to take the kids up in the Gondola and ski down the mountain. Should be a hoot!
We are having a blast and loving every minute of it!! More tomorrow.
Signing out from the top of the world.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Steamboat Skiing
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Steamboat Vacation Day 2
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Steamboat Vacation Day 1
We finally made it to Denver. Fairly uneventful, but that is the way we like it. A great ending to a great travel day. WIth the most excitement yet to come! Stay tuned...
Steamboat Vacation Day 1
Steamboat Vacation Day 1
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