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As Apple Shares Slide, What About Sales?
Apple Inc. tends to prove unstoppable even when other computer makers falter. In the most recent quarter, shipments of Macs surged 41%. That's nearly three times the 15% global growth rate for PCs in general.But in the current quarter, as markets slide, banks go belly-up, and consumer confidence plunges, even the Apple (AAPL) growth engine may hit speed bumps, say some analysts who are revisiting their estimates just a month before Apple is due to report quarterly earnings for the period that ends Sept. 30. Concerns, including slumping demand for laptops and a strengthening dollar, helped drive down Apple's shares more than 29%, to 126.84, on Sept. 23 from 179.32 on Aug. 14.One of the bright spots of Apple's last several quarters has been its MacBook and MacBook Pro lines of notebooks, which in the quarter ended June 28 accounted for more than $2.2 billion, or almost 30% of sales. In a Sept. 22 research note, Samuel Wilson of JMP Securities in San Francisco pointed to potential weakness in notebook sales.Stealth SurveyWilson called 20 Apple stores and 10 Best Buy (BBY) stores and concluded that demand might soon weaken for the higher-priced MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,999, vs. the less expensive MacBook, which starts at $1,099. "When asked whether we should consider a MacBook or a MacBook Pro, we were repeatedly told that the Pro is designed for the design community, with a high-end video card and a large screen, and that we would be better off with a MacBook for the cost," he wrote. Employees at Apple stores proved 40% more likely to push the MacBook Pro than their counterparts at Best Buy, he found.Chip suppliers in Asia report that Apple has been canceling orders for computer memory chips, according to Wilson. "The reasons for the cancellations might...
Green Hills Software Supports Intel(R) Atom(TM) Processor N270 (Broadcast Newsroom)
SANTA BARBARA, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 09/25/08 -- Green Hills Software, Inc., the technology leader in device software optimization (DSO) and real-time operating systems (RTOS), today announced the immediate availability of its embedded software development solution for the Intel® Atom(TM) processor N270. The Green Hills Software solution includes the INTEGRITY® real-time operating system, MULTI® ...
Tech Startup Tackles Energy Use by Data Centers
Data centers in the U.S. have created a carbon footprint that is larger than that of countries such as The Netherlands and Argentina. Internet companies such as Google are investing billions of dollars in setting up massive data centers and struggling to control soaring power usage. While Google may want its users to trawl thousands of terabytes of data and get their search results almost immediately, this activity gobbles up plenty of energy.Here's the problem for companies such as Google: power usage by data centers accounts for around 2 percent of all the power supplied to the U.S. grid and 2-3 percent globally.As companies struggle to balance their quest for greater computing capacity while controlling power use, they are turning to technology for answers. Virident, a California-based startup set up by a couple of IIT grads who also went to the same graduate school at University of Illinois, is looking to address this issue using by enhancing the memory capacity of servers using specially designed flash memory chips (commonly used in cell phones, for example) to increase the computing capability of servers.Virident (derived from Viridus in Latin meaning green and dent meaning to make; literally to make green), was started by Kumar Ganapathy and Vijay Karamcheti, who blended their experience across the semiconductor industry and academia to set up this company.Ganapathy was a Fellow with Rockwell Semiconductor before he set up his own start-up, VX Tel, which built voice over IP chipsets, and then worked with Artiman Ventures. Karamcheti worked with Google and spent the last 15 years working on parallelization techniques at New York University.The duo has teamed up with an assortment of business acquaintances to set up Virident and embed these flash memory chips in data centers. As a first step, the company roped in Raj Parekh, a...
Apple Is Greener, Greenpeace Says, But Has More To Do
At last Tuesday's laptop event on the Apple campus in Cupertino, Calif., the environment got a lot of attention. CEO Steve Jobs, who has been pushing for a "greener Apple" for months, flatly declared that the new Mac laptops, with their unibody aluminum construction and less toxic parts, "are the industry's greenest notebooks."The verdict from the planet's leading environmental group, Greenpeace, is a qualified yes. "Compared to where Apple was before Tuesday," said Casey Harrell, Greenpeace International's toxics campaigner, "its laptops are definitely better. That in and of itself is a good thing. But not all toxic pieces have been eliminated yet."Almost Toxic-FreeHarrell said Greenpeace had been hoping Apple would be the first to announce a laptop manufactured without any polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or brominated flame retardant (BFR) materials. Both produce toxic chemicals when burned, which frequently occurs when computer parts are shipped overseas for disposal."They fell slightly short of that goal," Harrell said. "They didn't quite get the PVCs out of the external power cord. If Apple can achieve that, then we could unequivocally say that they've put the rest of the computer industry on notice that these materials can be completely eliminated."In a press release Tuesday, Apple said it did eliminate all PVCs on internal cables in its MacBook laptops, and avoided the use of BFRs altogether. In addition, Apple said, the new MacBooks meet Energy Star 4.0, EPEAT Gold, and RoHS environmental standards.Harrell predicted that Apple's ranking on Greenpeace's environmental scale will rise in part because of the reduction in the use of toxic chemicals and because the new MacBooks use significantly less packaging.Apple said it measures its recycling performance by a standard first suggested by Dell: The percentage of material sold (by weight) collected in recycling. In 2007, Apple recycled 18.4 percent of the material it...
Clarification: Apple’s Dual GPU Setup
In our coverage on the Apple press event earlier this week, where Steve Jobs introduced a revamp of all the company's notebooks (as well as a new Cinema Display), an error leaked into our story. We said that the new dual-GPU MacBook Pros used Hybrid SLI so you could use both graphics chips at the same time for better performance, but as it turns out, this isn't the case. This was my fault since Jobs didn't actually claim any Hybrid SLI being used. To detail the matter further, Apple has released a support document explaining the features of the dual GPU architecture.
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