Daily Web Ramblings

It may have dropped the word computer from its name, but Apple is certainly selling plenty of Macs.

Driven in part by what analysts call a halo effect from the iPod and the iPhone, the market share of the company’s personal computers is surging.

“The Macintosh has a lot of momentum now,” said Steven Jobs, Apple’s chief executive.

On Friday, Apple will start selling the new Leopard version of its OS X operating system, which has a range of features that in some cases match those in Windows Vista and in others surpass them.

Mr Jobs said that Leopard would anchor a schedule of product upgrades that could continue for as long as a decade.

“I’m quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future,” he said.

“We’ve put out major releases on the average of one a year, and it’s given us the ability to polish and polish and improve and improve.”

That pace suggests Apple will continue to move more quickly than Microsoft, which took almost seven years between the release of its Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems.

Vista has had mixed reviews, and corporate sales have been slow. Mr Jobs declined to comment on Vista, beyond noting that he thought Leopard was better value.

While there are multiple editions of Vista with different features at different prices, the top being the Ultimate edition, Apple has set a single price of $US129 ($145) for Leopard.

With Leopard, Mr Jobs joked, everybody gets the Ultimate edition and it sells for 129 bucks, and if you go on Amazon and look at the Ultimate edition of Vista, it sells for 250 bucks.

Microsoft has said that it will release an update, or service pack, for Vista in the first quarter of 2008. But it has also said that it intends to offer a service pack for Windows XP in the first half of the year.

That, analysts said, could further delay adoption of Vista as computer users wait to see how XP will be improved.

Microsoft has also hinted that its next operating system, code-named Windows 7, would not arrive until 2010.

At Apple’s current pace, it will have introduced two new versions of its operating system by then.

Apple has not been flawless in its execution. Early this year it delayed the introduction of Leopard for four months.

Mr Jobs attributed this at the time to the company’s need to move programming development resources to an iPhone version of the OS X operating system.

Several analysts said they thought Leopard would have only an indirect effect on Macintosh sales.

As for Vista, it has clearly not pushed up demand for new PCs as much as computer makers hoped. Last week, research firm Gartner said PC shipments in the United States grew only 4.7 per cent in the third quarter, below its projection of 6.7 per cent.

That contrasted sharply with Apple’s projected results for the quarter. Gartner forecast that Apple would grow more than 37 per cent based on expected shipments of 1.3 million computers, for an 8.1 per cent share of the domestic market.

The New York Times