MacMinute Executive Briefing: Jan. 17
January 17, 2004 - 06:00 PST   MacMinute's Executive Briefing for January 17, 2004 -- a recap of all the news we have posted over the past week -- is now available. If you think you may have missed something, here is your chance to catch up.

Apple News

"It was an outstanding quarter for Apple, with double-digit unit and revenue growth and over 730,000 iPods sold," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We're kicking off 2004 with strong momentum, especially for Mac OS X, which is now used by almost 40 percent of our installed base, iPod and the iTunes Music Store, which has a 70 percent share of the legal music download market."

"We are very pleased to have exceeded our revenue and profit targets for the first quarter," said Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO. "Continued strong asset management enabled us to increase cash by $225 million to just under $4.8 billion. Looking ahead to the second quarter of fiscal 2004, we expect our third consecutive quarter of year-over-year double-digit growth in both revenue and earnings, with revenue of about $1.8 billion and earnings per diluted share of $.08 to $.10."

Apple captured 3.2 percent of the U.S. market share in 2003, down from 3.5 percent a year ago, according to research firm IDC. The company shipped 1.675 million Macs in 2003, compared with 1.679 units in 2002. Apple's worldwide market share remained under 2 percent in 2003. The companies ahead of Apple were: Dell (16.319 million - 30.9%), HP (10.851 million - 20.6%), IBM (2.748 million - 5.2% ), and Gateway (1.987 million - 3.8%).

Apple said it will open a new retail store at the La Encantada shopping center in Tucson, Arizona on Saturday, January 24 at 10:00 a.m. The new store, which was noted on MacMinute last year, will be Arizona's third.

CNN/Money reported the following this week: "Super Bowl XXVIII, for those of you counting, will mark the 20th anniversary of Apple's seminal ad showing a woman breaking a PC screen, which showed what a Super Bowl ad can do for a brand... Incidentally, a spokesman for Apple said the company doesn't have any plans to advertise during the Super Bowl to mark the ad's 20th anniversary, but he did inquire how many ad spots were left." It should be noted, however, that Pepsi has already purchased airtime during the event to announce the Pepsi-Apple iTunes promotion.

Hardware News

Contrary to much speculation, Hewlett-Packard said this week that it has no plans to offer Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) format in the recently announced HP-branded iPod, reports Wired. "We're not going to be supporting WMA for now," said Muffi Ghadiali, product marketing manager for HP's digital entertainment products group. "We picked the service that was the most popular (Apple's iTunes Music Store). We could have chosen another format, but that would have created more confusion for our customers.

FireWire Depotintroduced the Titan 5.25-inch and Venus 3.5-inch FireWire and combo FireWire/USB 2.0 aluminum drive enclosures. The "slim, lightweight and powerful" Titan enclosures are designed for any 5.25-inch IDE storage device, such as Tape Back-Up, Zip Drives, and CD, CD-RW, DVD, DVD+/-RW drives. The FireWire Titan is priced at $89.99, while the combo FireWire/USB 2.0 Titan sells for $99.99. The aluminum Venus enclosures work with any 3.5-inch IDE hard drive. The FireWire Venus is priced at $89.99, with the combo FireWire/USB 2.0 Venus costing $99.99.

Software News

Apple on Thursday announced Logic Pro 6 for professional musicians and Logic Express 6 for students and educators. Logic Pro 6 consolidates 12 pre-existing products into one package for just $999. Logic Express 6 provides a basic set of professional tools to allow students and educators to compose and produce music with sophisticated results at a price of $299. Both titles require Mac OS X 10.2 or higher and are expected to be available in March.

Apple also previewed its next generation professional audio technology that will be incorporated into future versions of the company's Logic audio production software. New software instruments demonstrated include Sculpture, a new component-modeling based synthesizer, and UltraBeat, a deep and rich percussion synthesizer that provides multiple synthesis techniques for generating every type of electronic or acoustic drum sound imaginable. Apple also demonstrated Guitar Amp, a new full-featured guitar amplifier simulator, and support for enhanced Apple Loops, the open-standard file format for real-time matching of audio loops and sound effects.

Apple released Soundtrack 1.2, an updated version of its royalty-free music production tool. Improvements in version 1.2 include MTC and MIDI beat clock synchronization, user customizable effect presets, improved support for large audio files, document compression, general media manager enhancements, and more.

In addition, Apple posted AppleWorks 6.2.9, the latest version of the company's productivity suite for Mac OS X. Apple says this release "supports mice with scroll wheels and improves the performance and reliability of AppleWorks’ presentation and spreadsheet environments. It also offers improved printing and resolves issues using web based templates and clip-art on networks using proxy servers."

Corel has discontinued its CorelDraw graphics suite product for Macs. "Corel has not experienced that much demand for this product from Mac users," Corel CEO Derek Burney told Macworld UK. He added that 96 percent of CorelDraw sales have been of the Windows version of the software, and said that the ten percent of sales to Mac users "were insufficient to justify Mac development of the product."

MakeMusic announced that it is now shipping the Mac OS X version of Finale 2004, its popular music notation software. Finale 2004 offers native Mac OS X support and several enhancements, including a "Human Playback" feature, the SmartMusic sound font, faster note entry, simplified shortcuts, improved expressions, and more.

Other Software:

• Mozilla 1.6 - open-source Web-browser, e-mail and newsgroup client


• TiVo Desktop 1.6 - software for TiVo's Home Media Option that lets users automatically stream music and photos from their Mac (via iTunes and iPhoto) to a TiVo Series2 DVR for listening/viewing on a TV


• Maestro - free Mac OS X scientific visualization tool created by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to work with the rovers Spirit and Opportunity


• PocketMac Smartphone Edition - solution to allow Mac users to synchronize data between their Mac and a Microsoft Smartphone


• Advanced Web Ranking 2.3 - Mac OS X tool that helps users check a Web site position on all major search engines


• Pod2Go 0.6 - "takes an ordinary iPod and makes it extraordinary by syncing news, weather forecasts, movie listings, stock quotes, horoscopes, driving directions and much more all with a few clicks of the mouse"


• Web Help Desk 7 - technical support software for Mac OS X


• ChronoSync 2.0.4 - automated synchronization and backup application for Mac OS X


• iPod Access 3.0 - utility for transfering songs from your iPod to your Mac

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