monday 22 october 2007
Dear All -
As always, a warm welcome to new readers of this newsletter, going out around the globe - most of you are clients - thank you. Let me know if you want to be deleted from the mailing list, let me know if you change email address - each mailing comes back with a few "Not at this address anymore." notes.
As I always point out – this email goes out to you all - to some of you it will seem all “old news”, to some of you it will “over my head, dear boy”, some of it will be of interest to some of you. Call me if you'd like more information about any of the items here.
For reference, the last Quick Update (no. 7) was issued on 24 september (about my holiday - very nice, thanks for asking!).
Apple Store purchases. Rod Gorgia is our man at Apple - call him on 0800 03 999 01 extn 88094 for your Apple (and other) purchases with discount.
Mac Doctor Towers news: I'm now in my new office, as are the computers, the files, the books, the desks, and the boxes.
Penny de Quincey has left town for a gap-year away with her husband (Stuart), on the road, and so I welcome Carolyn Smith who has agreed to become the new "Janet" for the Mac Doctor. Thanks to Penny for her super contribution to the running of the office for the past 6 months, and thanks to Carolyn for agreeing to come and make the office even more productive.
There are two main sections in this comparatively short newsletter.
Here’s the Apple stuff:
A: OS X 10.5 - Leopard
Apple has officially announced that Mac OS X Leopard will go on sale Friday, October 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and and the Apple online store is now accepting pre-orders.
Pricing Leopard will be priced at £85 for a single user license. The Mac OS X Leopard Family Pack is a single-household, five-user license that will be available for a suggested retail price of £129.
Mac Up-To-Date The standard Mac OS Up-To-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchased a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller on or after October 1, 2007 for a shipping and handling fee of £5.95.
System Requirements Leopard requires a minimum of 512MB of RAM and is designed to run on any Macintosh computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 (867 Mhz or faster) processor.
Other system requirements:
• Front Row requires a Mac with built-in infra-red receiver and an Apple Remote.
• DVD Player requires a 1.6GHz processor or faster for improved de-interlacing.
• iChat: Photo Booth and backdrop effects require an Intel Core Duo or faster processor.
• Developer tools require 1GB of memory (RAM) and an additional 3GB of available disk space.
I have pre-ordered a copy and will load it on a spare partition on my main computer here. I'll let you know how I get on.
Apple UK's Press Release is at: http://www.themacdoc.co.u/LeopardPR
B: Apple results - Q4
Apple today (22 october) announced financial results for its fiscal 2008 fourth quarter ended 29 september 2007. The Company posted revenue of US$6.22 billion and net quarterly profit of $904 million. These results compare to revenue of $4.84 billion and net quarterly profit of $542 million, in the year-ago quarter.
Gross margin was 33.6 percent, up from 29.2 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 40 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple shipped 2,164,000 Macs, representing 34 percent growth over the year-ago quarter and exceeding the previous quarterly record for Mac shipments by 400,000.
The Company sold 10,200,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 17 percent growth over the year-ago quarter.
Quarterly iPhone sales were 1,119,000, bringing cumulative fiscal 2007 sales to 1,389,000.
“We are very pleased to have generated over $24 billion in revenue and $3.5 billion in net income in fiscal 2007,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We're looking forward to a strong December quarter as we enter the holiday season with Apple’s best products ever.”
“Apple ended the fiscal year with $15.4 billion in cash and no debt,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the first quarter of fiscal 2008, we expect revenue of about $9.2 billion and earnings per diluted share of about $1.42.”
C: iPhone and O2
Following the announcement that O2 here in the UK will offer the Apple iPhone from november, and the amount that Apple has charged O2 for the "privilege", it is fairly clear who'll be paying for it. I'm impressed that Apple was able to persuade european mobile phone providers to hand over as much cash as they get out of AT&T. Apple is a *very* powerful player!
This is not a cheap phone to have - it will cost you, at currently published prices, £900 to own one for the first 18 months (minimum period) of your contract.
As someone has pointed out, for that you could get a Nokia N95 'phone on a 12 month Flext35 contract, with double the included minutes, and unlimited 1.4mbit 3.5G. What's more, you'd still have enough left to buy an 8GB iPod Nano. And an entire PC! (If you wanted to buy a PC of course!). More than a few of you have expressed an interest in getting an iPhone when they come here – I hope to issue some "Reports from the Field" on these wonderful devices.
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And in other news..........:
I: KeyCue
Did you know that the average Mac OS X application has 40 to 80 menu shortcuts (things like Apple-P to Print; Apple-Q to Quit the application)?
Menu shortcuts provide quick access to frequently used menu commands. But honestly: how many shortcuts do you know by heart?
KeyCue helps you to use your Mac OS X applications more effectively by displaying a concise table of all currently available menu shortcuts.
Find it at: http://www.macility.com/products/keycue/
II: Disco
I think I've mentioned Disco before, but for any of you who want to write more than a CD or more than a DVD's worth of data art a time; or who want to write several sessions to a CD (ie to fill it up, without wasting it after one "burn"), have a look at Disco.
Find it at: http://www.discoapp.com/
III: Karelia's iMedia
Karelia has debuted a free media browser for Mac OS X called iMedia that acts like the repository that Apple includes in some of its applications, but is accessible from within any application. The tool can be used to access photos, music, videos, and bookmarks, including the iPhoto library, Aperture library, Pictures folder, and other predefined folders; the iTunes library, GarageBand songs, Music folder; bookmarks from Safari, Firefox, OmniWeb, and more. The tool allows you to drag and drop any folder into the source list to add to your library and download plugins such as iDelicious to extend capabilities of the browser. The browser is available from the Dock or the Menu Bar, via application preferences.
Find it at: http://www.karelia.com/imedia/
IV: Notes from the field
Notes are contributions from users like yourself. They might be something discovered; they might be a question that is looking for an answer, they might be publicising something you or your organisation have done. They will be posted at www.themacdoc.co/field.html immediately, and some posted here:
Says P:
""Powerpoint files created with MS Office 2004, when then opened on a PC running MS Office, regularly lose their fonts - even if the same fonts used appear to be available on the PC, like dear old Times New Roman.
Each slide affected then has to be laboriously re-edited to change the font back to what it was when it left the Mac. Is this a phenomenon others have encountered; and if so, does anyone know a way to avoid it or efficiently to correct the unwanted replaced fonts (selecting all the slides and then using the 'Replace Fonts' command does not work)?""
OK, that's it for the moment. Any questions - let me know!
Best wishes to you all, and thanks for being Mac users
hugh
As always, previous newsletters can be found at http://www.themacdoc.co.uk/pastemails.html where this one will be posted in a while