Shine on Apple
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Apple is poised to sell even more movies and even more computers, solidifying one of the few categorically successful integrations of technology and media, hardware and entertainment content.
Yesterday the house that Jobs built announced deals with an expanded stable of Hollywood studios to start selling new feature films through the online iTunes store on the same day the films are released on DVD. Cheaper than new-release DVDs, they’ll go for $14.99 — compared with the $9.99 price of most iTunes movie offerings — and they’ll be playable across the spectrum of Apple devices, including iPods, Macintosh computers, iPhones and widescreen televisions using Apple TV, as the San Jose Mercury News notes. As Craig Kornblau, head of Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Universal Pictures Digital Platforms, tells The Wall Street Journal, “this is a game changer. … For all the studios to offer all their movies [on the same date] as DVD, with the most influential marketing company in the digital space, is a very exciting development.” The addition of Warner Brothers is a particular coup, since the studio also brings the largest library in Hollywood. The motivation of studios once reluctant to yield pricing control to Apple isn’t hard to see. As the Financial Times points out, DVD sales last year fell for the first time in a decade.
But for all Apple’s savvy on the media front — or perhaps because of it — it is Apple’s computer business that could be poised to offer the company the most growth, as suggested by the 51% year-to-year increase in Mac sales Apple reported for the first three months of the year. The less-obvious factor in Mac demand, BusinessWeek reports is Apple’s burgeoning move into the relatively unexploited world of business computing. Since Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, his driving philosophy has been to conquer consumers with “insanely great” ideas that were cooler and more user-friendly than the competition’s. As BusinessWeek, points out, Apple doesn’t even have sales and repair teams catering to corporate buyers. The sales pressure on businesses instead has come from workers who may have started with an iPod, later bought a Mac for home use and disliked the “Windows-by-day, Mac-by-night” existence, the magazine says. Michele Goins, chief information officer at Juniper Networks, decided in February “to respond to the growing chorus of Mac lovers among the networking company’s 6,100 employees,” BusinessWeek reports, and after launching a trial run thinks a quarter of Juniper’s staff would choose Macs.
Tags: movie, street, wall
Interesting. I’ve been less than impressed with Apple’s Storage offerings, but then I’m an EMC fanbois. The hell of it is I see more and more people going out and buying a BBOD (Big Box O’ Disk) a fiber switch and calling it a SAN/NAS. Um… it’s usually not. Most usually it’s sexy DASD (Direct Attached Storage Device) and the only network involved is between the primary host (or cluster) and the service processors. Don’t get me wrong, it’s uber cool that people are getting away from the days of internal drives and going to FC attached storage, but the market is young(ish) and the big names haven’t really made a big play for it yet. Hell it took the EMC, HP and IBM’s of the world long enough to come out with their mid-sized storage devices.Apple’s just been in the right place at the right time again. They didn’t compete with the big names in the mid-range, they were happy to play in the ‘Entry-level not-really-a-san’ market which has been exploding. Give it time when IBM and the rest smell the money they’ll throw resources to that market as well(as a side note to Apple: iSCSI. Now.)
My school has a music service agreement with Ruckus.com and they store all the music locally on campus. The music is in the form of a DRM windows media file and they’re all served up on Apple Xserves which is a bit ironic when you think about it.Go Apple Go.
All the information I have heard from fellow sysadmins is that the Apple XServe arrays are very unreliable and have very frequent disk failures. Give me a NAS NetApp solution any day.. ok its not cheap but when you need uptime and reliability its the beez kneez, or if you want to go to an extreme there is always the bullet proof Hitachi disk systems.Apple storage in my opinion is just a ‘toy’ storage for small customers who dont care about reliability and want gobs of disk on the cheap.IBM/EMC/NetApp/Hitachi and now some of the new Sun offerings are good storage systems in my opinion.
Digg is turning into an Apple fangirl site.
I’m using the chicken to measure it!
So was a reason given for them not shipping to an APO? Seems questionable to me that they would do this unless they had problemswith shipping to APOs in the past (i.e. missing/damaged shipments).Or is there potentially another issue?
I think its the fact that Apple offer more for your money then any other vendor. Although the gigabyte per pound isn’t as good as others, I’ve heard (note, I’ve never actually used one, just heard) that the management interface is excellent, and good management software has to be a big consideration when you’re buying terabytes of storage.
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