Do or die time, Apple

Ahem.

I have had around $2500 set aside specifically to use for buying my first Mac, a MacBook Pro (witness the iPhone “halo effect” in action) for 5 months now. Anyone who has been reading this blog has seen me predicting them for a while now. I was all set to buy one, had already gotten a quote on a BTO model with lots of accessories, and then boom! The rumors – some of them seemingly credible – started coming out about imminent hardware updates (see here and here for early examples).

Not being one to blow $2000+ on an outmoded architecture, I said I’d give Apple till the holiday season to announce new MBPs. If nothing was forthcoming, I’d look elsewhere. Then I said I’d give them through the launch of the i5/i7s. Then I said I’d wait until the MacWorld Expo. Then I said I’d wait until after the iPad launch.

5 months ago, I didn’t *need* a new laptop, but I *need* one now. Tradeshow season is starting, and I need a mobile workhorse. My aging Windows XP HP laptop is choking some of the editing software updates I’ve installed. I’m lucky to get 2 hours out of my battery, and I fly the 6-hour cross-country BOS to LAX route on a monthly basis. Meanwhile, In the past 5 months, I’ve grown to really enjoy Windows 7 on my desktop PC. Sony, Asus, and HP have all put out some very attractive, very competitive, very powerful i5 and i7 laptops.

If Apple doesn’t launch something this month, I’m out – Sony or Asus will have my business. There’s no excuse for Apple to go almost a year between hardware refreshes. They’re playing in the big leagues – they need to be updating every 6 months, at least. Release early, release often. Iterate. Evolve and improve.

It took Apple 15 years to convince me to switch to a Mac – and it only took 6 months for their policy of absolute secrecy on their product roadmap to give Microsoft and PC manufacturers the chance to win me back.

Forget the Slate; how about new MacBooks in January?

I think it’s funny that so many tech journals are buzzing about the possibility of the Apple tablet (rumored to be codenamed “Slate”) announcement event in January, when there’s a far more likely main attraction to this event than that.

I’ve been predicting an update to Apple’s MacBook Pro line for over 4 months now. The line is due for a refresh, and I thought for certain it would happen with the latest round of releases back in October. I was wrong – that update was confined strictly to the iMac line and the regular MacBooks, but I’ve been predicting a January launch for new Pros ever since.

In the meantime, Intel has released the Clarksfield (Core i7) quad core and announced they will release their new Arrandale dual core on January 7th, 2010 – exactly 2 years to the day after they released their previous major mobile processor family, Peryn. Keep in mind that after that upgrade, on 07 January 2008, Apple took just about 7 weeks to release their new family of MacBooks, in late February 2008.

The integrated GPU on the Arrandale alone is expected to create huge performance leaps, and given that the MBP is marketed as a media editing powerhouse, I’ve got to believe Apple will want to get those into their top-end machines ASAP. The fact is, Apple needs to either put out a quad-core MacBook Pro to justify the high top-end prices in the current lineup and remain competitive – especially given that you can get the very sexy (MacBook lookalike) HP Envy with a quad core for $1800 – or they need to add some other form of WoW factor to bring back the justification of such a high price tag. MBPs are supposed to be the ultimate combination of style, power, and efficiency, which ultimately justifies their significantly higher price point.

The reason so many of us (anecdotally speaking) are holding off on a laptop purchase right now is that the new tech that is right around the corner is such a huge improvement over what exists today, we’d be fools to pull the trigger before we see what’s just around the bend. Quad core laptops, integrated GPUs, and other goodies all work to create an almost overwhelming sense that 2010 is the year of the notebook.

And now there’s this likely Apple event on January 26th. Look, while everyone is hot for the Apple tablet, I’m not convinced this is the time to announce it. Not on the heels of a massive recession holiday season. Give it 3 or 4 months, start building momentum for next holiday season. Time it right, and the Apple tablet could be the “must-have” “gadget of the year” for 2010.

I think ultimately the January event will be focused on the release of new Arrandale- and Clarksfield-based MacBooks, with a theme along the lines of “[energy] efficiency, speed, and mobility.” Which, come to think of it, does tie  in nicely with the tablet …

Snowball effect

Via AdMob (read the PDF report) we learn today that the iPhone now generates 55% of all US mobile web traffic, up from a 24% share just one year ago (see here). Meanwhile RIM’s share of mobile web traffic in the US has dropped from 27% last year to only 12% today. Indeed, the Blackberry OS is now #3 behind the iPhone OS and Android OS (which represents 20% of domestic web traffic today, up from 0 a year ago). The trend isn’t just domestic. Over the same period, the iPhone has grown globally from 15% to 50% of all traffic, while RIM has dropped from 10% to just 7% today.

So, we know that, given the current adoption rate and consumer plans for future purchases, sometime next year there should be more iPhones on the market than Blackberries, and that’s assuming Apple doesn’t release a new iteration of the phone (because iPhone adoption spikes with each new release, whereas RIM’s adoption rates remain constant). We know that iPhones have higher customer satisfaction than Blackberries by a wide margin. We know that developers are abandoning other OS environments for the iPhone because they aren’t profitable enough, or don’t have a big enough audience (read: market share).

I’m not saying that Apple has won the mobile wars by any stretch of the imagination (2 years ago, one could have said the same of RIM), but it’s hard to argue with that kind of inertia.

Spoke too soon?

Last week I wrote about my predictions for a holiday refresh to the Apple product lineup and how they fared against reality.

The MacBook Pro part of the refresh will only minimally update the top-tier MBPs with more processing horsepower, maybe a 10-20% increase, and possibly quad-core options on the top-end $2000+ models. The focus is going to be on the low- and mid-end systems, so I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if there was no update at all to the MBPs.

0/2 here, but +1 to overall score for calling no update. I was close on the quad-cores – this update did include quad cores, but for the iMacs, not the MBPs. I should have figured, since no one uses quad-cores in their laptops today, but I was letting my hopes for the update cloud my judgment.

Well, it turns out I might have been less wrong than before! According to 9to5Mac.com, who were rather accurate in their predictions about the latest refresh, Apple may be about to unleash quad-core MacBook Pros after all!

… [W]e’ve heard that Apple Store Geniuses are being trained on new Quad-Core (possibly Core i5 and i7) processor MacBook Pros and they expect to take delivery of the new machines at the same time that the new high-end Core i5 and Core i7 iMacs hit stores in November. That would probably be timed right with a 10.6.2 release.

Apple has traditionally used the same processors in iMacs and high end MacBook/Powerbooks with the exception of the G5 iMac.  iMacs and MacBook Pros were also the first Macs with Intel chips, introduced simultaneously in 2006.

But then there’s this:

We haven’t heard anything about outer design changes which would be unlikely – the current MacBook Pros were updated earlier this year with SD cards and enclosed batteries.  We also expect these things to top out at 8GB of RAM.  The iMacs can go to 16GB but that is with four RAM slots.

Repeat after me Apple: HDMI-out, antiglare standard, and Blu-Ray. Everyone else gets it, why not you?

I know, I know, it will never happen, Apple wants to promote HD downloads, etc. A guy can dream, can’t he?

I wasn’t 100% wrong

About a month ago I posted a prediction over on Brian’s blog at ESPNish, and I’m happy to report that I wasn’t 100% wrong!

I’m predicting the focus here will be on price, unification, price, cashing in on the “halo effect,” price, minor speed updates, and price.

First paragraph, 3/7. Cashing in on the “halo effect” is purely subjective, so you can’t say I’m wrong there (nyah nyah), and there’s no doubt there were speed increases. In fairness, whether those were “minor” or “major” speed increases depends on your POV. There was also a bit of unification (as described below) by bringing the Macbook up to par in some ways with the rest of the family. Unfortunately, I really believed Apple was going to drop some prices seeing as we’re, like, you know, in the middle of the biggest recession in, like, a billion years.

I’m betting on lower price points for the iMac – at least one sub-$1000 price point should be coming. No style changes – they’re going to want to make this look just like the existing systems to keep the idea that it’s a high-end system out there. Minimal changes to the top end, just faster processors and minor tweaks, if anything.

This one is a toughy, but I’m going to give myself 2/3. The style did remain largely unchanged – it was just tweaked a bit, thinned out, with enlarged screens. Definitely bigger additions to processing power than I was expecting. Unfortunately, I was wrong about the price drops again.

Ditto on the MacBook refresh. I’m going with one price point below $1000 (not counting the $999.99 they have today), probably at $699 or $799, with the same basic specs as the 13” has today, but in alumninum. Plastic is history – I’m calling everything going aluminum unibody from here on out, gaining the benefits of the new battery layout, if not reaching that 6-8 hour longevity on the lowest end. It will still have a good battery life, maybe 3-4 hours. This is a gamble, as I think they might have wanted to get this out for the back-to-school season, but continuing economic woes may have forced their hands here.

Ugh. This one I really boned up here. Being generous, I’m giving myself 2/5. I would have sworn Apple would go 100% aluminum here, but I do get keeping the plastics around as a distinguishing feature. At least I got the unibody and battery predictions right! I’m pleased to see Apple claiming a 7 hour battery on this one, too – I’ll be waiting to see full benchmarks in the next few days to see if the reality matches the specs.

The MacBook Pro part of the refresh will only minimally update the top-tier MBPs with more processing horsepower, maybe a 10-20% increase, and possibly quad-core options on the top-end $2000+ models. The focus is going to be on the low- and mid-end systems, so I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if there was no update at all to the MBPs.

0/2 here, but +1 to overall score for calling no update. I was close on the quad-cores – this update did include quad cores, but for the iMacs, not the MBPs. I should have figured, since no one uses quad-cores in their laptops today, but I was letting my hopes for the update cloud my judgment.

That leaves me with 8/17, or 47% accuracy. Not too shabby for a guy whose only Apple product is an iPhone!

As a side note, the Magic Mouse is a very cool idea, and I can’t wait to play with one and see if it’s what I’m looking for. At the very least, it’s cool to note that Apple has come full circle back to a mouse with no buttons!