Bacon wrapped shrimp samples and Apple’s latest MacBook Air — could there be a better combination? Both Walmart and Sam’s Club stores in these oddly dysfunctional United States both carry the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Soon, however, America’s second-favorite warehouse chain might offer Apple’s Macintosh product line, as well, or so the rumor goes.
Back in 1999, the original iBook was the first production, mass market computer to ship with 802.11b networking built in. Since then the company was the first major vendor to market with faster and faster versions of wi-fi. And, by that I mean Apple chose to ship months and sometimes year before the standards had been set and settled.
When did the original iPad arrive? April 3. And, the iPad 2? It began shipping on March 11. If you were a betting person with no special insider knowledge, when would you think Apple plans to ship their next-generation tablet? No, it doesn’t take a rocket science to reckon it.
With the ongoing iOS-ification of the Mac in the form of OS X Lion, which incidentally lots of people hate, not to mention the fact that Apple makes the vast majority of its money on things other than high-powered tower computers, lots of people have speculated that the Mac Pro will be discontinued.
One of the truly awesome things about the iPad is its battery life, which Apple advertises at 10 hours but in my experience regularly exceeds that. Now imagine that your Mac, iPhone, iPad or whatever can run for days, weeks or even longer while never requiring charging in the traditional sense.
Everyone’s favorite Cupertino, California-based fruit company has a surplus of unicorn tears, so many in fact that Tim Cook wants them off the books and will distribute them to shareholders sometime next year. Sure. We’ve heard this from regular shareholders, as well as institutional investors endless bleating for “their share” of the spoils, more than once before. However, now that Steve Jobs is gone, the bleaters are back.
There’s been a lot of public angst in recent months over rumors that Apple plans to cut the Mac Pro from its catalog. With Cupertino seemingly moving whole hog to the consumer space — i.e. Final Cut Pro X, iOS-ification of OS X — the truly faithful view the Mac Pro as the canary in the coal mine for the entire high-end segment.
The US Senate has passed a bill that would sanction China for manipulating its currency and the Obama Administration approved a deal to upgrade Taiwan’s aging F-16 fighters — what the heck do these things have to do with a MacBook Pro’s Aluminum unibody enclosure? Perhaps nothing, perhaps everything.
The Beard, a.k.a. Jim Dalrymple, has already told us that Apple developed a 7-inch alongside the Apple’s “magical and revolutionary” 9.7-inch iPad. Given Dalrymple’s long and highly accurate rumorological record, I tend to believe him. So, whether or not we’ll eventually see one likely depends on how successful the Kindle Fire turns out to be.
Outside of retail, about 20,000 people work for the mothership. Thereupon, 5 percent of those are engineers designing the chips used in the company’s world beating smartphones and tablets. That goes a long way to explaining why the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad outperform and outlast the competition while costing less to produce.
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