The clues are all there - including the detail on how long you might have to wait for Apple to include Blu-ray in its Macintosh line
Some interesting points arising from Apple's third-quarter (its financial year starts in September) results and its Lion release and its release of new computers the other day, and wider trends in computer sales:
Apple stuff
• iPads (9.2m) exceeded Macs (3.95m) for the fourth quarter in a row - and they're now more than double the number sold.
• if you describe iPads as "PCs" (Steve Ballmer does, but you may disagree) then Apple would be the second-largest PC vendor in the world (behind HP, which shipped 14.9m units in Q2 according to Gartner.
• However, it probably doesn't make sense to define an iPad as a "PC". The whole tablet class is intended for a different sort of computing; the HP TouchPad certainly positions itself as an enterprise device (something that's been repeatedly emphasised to me by its executives) but the sort of work you do with it fits into places where laptops and desktops don't easily go.
• The new Mac mini released on Wednesday doesn't have an optical (CD or DVD) drive.
• The new MacBook Airs released on Wednesday don't have an optical drive.
• The low-end MacBook is being phased out.
• The new MacBook Airs only use Flash (SSD) drives. They're smaller, but they're much quicker than hard drives.
• Lion is being made available as a download for $29 in the US (£21 in the UK) or you can get it on a USB key for $69.
• Lion is much more like a tablet operating system than previous versions of OSX. Not surprising, since Snow Leopard came out before the iPad OS had been completed.
• Lion has an "internet recovery" system where if the hard drive of your machine needs repair, you can reboot from the internet. You'll need broadband, but it's available in lots of places. This won't help if your hard drive crashes, but it's certainly useful.
PC sales
• If you strip out Apple's Macintosh sales from the worldwide PC market, a total of 81.2m (Gartner) or 80.4 (IDC) Windows PCs were sold in the quarter. I'll take that as being near enough accuracy if you compare it to my analysis of Microsoft's "more than 400m Windows 7 licences" sold, where I offered 80m PCs as the figure (because obviously Microsoft doesn't get a licence on Macintosh shipments).
• That's a year-on-year growth of Windows PCs of just 1.8%; and that growth is only visible because PC sales in the Asia-Pacific region grew at quite a clip, of 9% of so. The picture in the US and western Europe is of contraction in Windows PC sales. (I'm adding that qualification because Apple, once more, grew faster than the rest of the market - by 11.9%, or nearly ten times faster - for the 16th successive quarter. It's coming from a very low base, but it's still an interesting fact which must point to a "halo effect" from the success of the iPhone and, more recently, iPad.)
• Microsoft is looking towards tablets and other devices too: its ambitious "one ecosystem" plan seems oriented towards a world where you might use your desktop PC... or you might not. You might be on a tablet. For Microsoft, it's the only way forward.
Given all that... you can see a few things. PC sales in the west, where they first penetrated, really look like they've peaked. Corporations replacing older systems have been driving sales along, but consumers are holding back. Partly this is going to be because of the economic outlook: people in the US and Europe don't have any particular reason to splash out at present, since the forecast isn't exactly rosy, with the US struggling with its debt ceiling and the Eurozone facing a meltdown.
But the risk is that by the time those two crises have sorted themselves out and the US and Europe are back to "normal" growth (whatever that looks like in the future), computing trends will have morphed. Apple tends to lead the computing industry to places that it could already go, but isn't quite brave enough to move into: abandoning floppy drives with the iMac, and putting Wi-Fi into laptops. (True, Dell was first with Wi-Fi in laptops, but it didn't push them out across half its laptop line, as Apple did with the original iBook.)
Now Apple is saying that the future is no optical drives, no hard drives (Flash instead) and internet boots. Lots of the computing future might not look like the computing past. Are desktop PCs really the right way for children to first learn interaction with computers at primary schools? Does everyone in a business need a desktop or laptop?
Yes, you could certainly argue that tablets are just a fad like netbooks. (And look where netbooks are going: sales are way down.) But Microsoft doesn't seem to be thinking that; it seems to think tablets (as slates or "convertible" tablets with keyboards) will be an important segment.
Apple, meanwhile, thinks all connections will be to the cloud. Google agrees, with its ChromeOS, which is entirely cloud-based (though with some offline working promised.) Which also offers a hint on when you're going to see Blu-ray drives in Apple Macs. Yes, they're all over the place in Windows laptops. But it looks they'll never come to Apple machines. Instead, Apple is pointing towards downloads as the way it sees things in the future.
And if you think that's just Apple, consider this question: do you think those Windows 8 tablets that we're all being led to expect sometime from late 2012 will include bulky DVD or Blu-ray hard drives? And do you think they'll have spinning hard drives, or SSDs? The answer is pretty obvious.
Microsoft reports its results on Thursday night. Watch for what it says about PC sales. (The transcript is usually on Seeking Alpha the next morning UK time.)
Go on - predict how computing will look in five years' time. Five years ago there were no iPads, no netbooks, barely any SSDs, and you could still get floppy drives, but it was hard to get a Blu-ray drive. How about 2016? How does that look to you?
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/jul/21/post-pc-apple-products-show
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