Apple – Page 3 – Sol Young

Apple on pace for 10% market share this month

Posted on January 15, 2009 by Sol Young with Leave a comment

I described in December that Market Share for Apple would hit 9.5% at the end of December and break 10% in January. So far Apple exceeded expectations and reached 9.63% in December. That’s a 0.76% gain of the operating system market in one month!

Look for January to carry another increase and for AAPL to break 10%, probably diminishing the effect of Steve’s health-related absense a little bit.

In related news the iPhone browser share also grew. It now holds 0.44% of the market, a move from 0.37% last month and the largest single month gain for the device. Windows dropped almost a full point from 89.62% to 88.68%. Pocket IE is no longer tracked, probably now <0.01% market share. Playstation remained at 0.04%.

For more in-depth detail of market share, visit http://marketshare.hitslink.com.

Posted in Apple, iPhone, Prediction, Windows

Prediction: Apple breaks 10% marketshare in January 2009

Posted on December 31, 2008December 31, 2008 by Sol Young with 6 Comments

Apple

Apple’s OS X operating system base grew by 0.66% between October and November to 8.87%. If they simply maintained the prior month’s pace, they will reach 9.5% in December and 10.1% in January (assuming a continued consumption of 0.6% from other operating systems per month).

Vista being a monstrous failure is only helping, and XP is nearly a decade old. It seems almost difficult for Apple’s marketshare not to jump beyond double digits.

Take a look at Piper Jaffray’s 12 unanswered questions to see how their Q3 and Q4 sales turned out. The new MacBook and MacBook Pro have been great successes. Apple also plans to open 20-30 new stores in FY09.

UPDATE: Remember too that 10% may not seem like a lot for the operating system, but 10% of the hardware sold is absolutely huge.

Check marketshare.hitslink.com after January to see if I’m right…

Posted in Apple, Prediction

The Apple Philadelphia Weather Widget Bug

Posted on December 11, 2008December 11, 2008 by Sol Young with 2 Comments

Found a funny little bug with Apple’s dashboard weather widget this week. It comes installed and running by default when you set up a new OS X installation or buy a new Mac. I just got a new MacBook Pro a month ago and have been using the weather widget religiously. As John Gruber of Daring Fireball described, it’s one of the favorite widgets (and he has a good old how-to on how to make it better).

But rather than validating by zip code, the weather widget validates by city name only. It grabs the first city name, alphabetically, and plugs that in as your local weather default.

There are five cities in the USA with the name Philadelphia. In alphabetical order, they are Philadelphia MO (Missouri), Philadelphia MS (Mississippi), Philadelphia NY (New York), Philadelphia PA (Pennsylvania), and Philadelphia TN (Tennessee).

Apple’s widget grabs Philadelphia, MO for Philadelphia, PA (and MS, NY, TN). Until this week the weather patterns for MO vs. PA were the same for precipitation and within a few degrees on temperature. It took a month before the cities were different enough to notice the discrepancy.

For all you’z Philadelphians buying Macs, remember to plug in your 191xx zip codes :) To see this in action if you’re in another city, add a weather widget to the dashboard and search for “Philadelphia”. The same occurs This does not occur on an iPhone’s weather app.

Population data on the Philadelphias:

Posted in Apple, Geolocation, iPhone, iPhone 3G, MacBook Pro, Philadelphia

Apple iPhone Tech Talks – NYC – raw notes on new web app features

Posted on December 2, 2008December 2, 2008 by Sol Young with 4 Comments

Attending an Apple Tech Talk at the Millennium Hotel New York was a good use of time today. The evangelism team, despite evangelizing, is highly competent and I came away satisfied with decent knowledge consumption.

The event had a massively different feel than John Resig described last year.

There was a lot of JavaScript hate by attendees (“blah blah… GWT is the only thing we trust… blah blah JavaScript is a stupid language…”).

This year it was all about at least 50% about the web. Apple has exposed touch events, multi-touch events, gestures, location based services, and rotation to javascript both for polling and callbacks. Some of the credit for the newfound excitement around Safari and iPhone web apps should probably be shared with WebKit’s HTML5 (file caching and SQLite)… All of which are supported in the iPhone 2.2 OS release.

Over the next few days I’ll have more details on specific highlights. For now, here are my condensed raw notes.Continue Reading

Posted in Apple, iPhone, iPhone 3G

iPhone 2.2 forces app rating response to delete apps

Posted on November 21, 2008 by Sol Young with 2 Comments

This is a very poorly thought out plan. When you delete an app you’re asked to rate the app, where a dialog is popped that gives the option of selecting between 0 and 5 stars.

At first thought, there will be lots more app ratings and this will help Apple kull (my favorite word this week) poor applications. On second thought, why would you give a good rating to an app you wish to remove? And how about an app you never remove? There will be many bad ratings applied to apps, without getting an equal response from those who like the app and keep it… The users who love the app will never be prompted for their rating.

Posted in Apple, iPhone