There were a couple of updates late last week and following the announcement of Apple's good Quarterly results, Microsoft followed with their quarterly figures. Only Redmond was not in the black. This week is the first part of my look at the new 13" MacBook Pro.

13" MacBook Pro(1): Getting the Feel

That was only really a look at getting it out of the box and next week I will have some more information about what it feels like. Would I have one? In a nanosecond. Although this is the 2.26Ghz one I have in my hands, which is faster than my current 15" MacBook Pro, I would probably go for the 2.53 GHz version partly because of the larger hard disk and higher memory at 4G RAM.

There was an upgrade to Final Cut Studio during the week. This is a suite of programs for making movies and contains Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Soundtrack Pro 3, Color 1.5, Compressor 3.5 and DVD Studio Pro 4. The whole lot is $999 which is a couple of hundred cheaper than the suite it replaces, and there is an upgrade for $299. All applications however are still not 64-bit.

Have a look at the pages and link to some of what has been produced with the software already, including some familiar movies.

There was also an Upgrade to Logic Pro which is the professional software tool for those in the music industry. It is also a suite of programs with Logic Pro 9, Plug-ins and Sounds, Mainstage 2, Soundtrack Pro 3, and Production Utilities. It is priced at $499 and there is an upgrade for current users for $199.

The boxes for these are apparently smaller too: the previous ones would certainly not fit in a small bag.

These two were followed by an update to the Pro Software application and this was recommended for those with the previous two and for those, like me, who use Aperture.

I had one of those, "I am pulling ky hair out with Windows" emails on Friday. A local man who is about to become a switcher to the Mac has asked me a few questions in the past few weeks as he finalises his decisions. He has been using his phone to take movies and some of the clips are rotated. As luck would have it, I had seen an Apple article on the iPhone and this exact situation, so I was able to send the reader one of the links in that article, that accessed some advice on iMovie: "use the rotate feature".

A look at the image on the iMovie article page is not that clear, but first the Crop button has to be clicked, then the rotate arrows are available. No pulling of the hair out is needed now.

The only place you could read about the Apple financial results last week was this podcast as the Post did not carry it, although they did have a bit on Microsoft's losses. Records were broken by Cupertino and Apple last week.

On Earnings central on CNBC, we had some of the pundits looking at tech stock just before the Microsoft announcements. Among these were Rob Enderle and Jim Goldman who were positive on Redmond. Enderle who has had much criticism when it comes to his negativity for Apple and positive view of Microsoft, said "I’m expecting some really good news in terms of outlook", while Larry, who I think is Larry Kudlow, called MS a turkey.

Enderle objected to that by saying that this is the biggest tech company in the world, missing the point about the reality he was after. It is the same as when people tell me that Redmond spends more on security than anyone else. As Rixstep tell us, it is because they have to. This is a case when size does not matter: ask Goliath.

See the video, then look at that reality with Richard Walters Financial Times report. Microsoft admits sales have declined 17%, profits were down and the shares then dropped by 10% within a day or so. As a note, sales from the Windows PC division fell by 29% and that cannot all be put down to Phantip Plaza as 86% of corporate PCs are still on XP. Microsoft's decline needs to be laid firmly at the door of the man in charge: maybe he will listen for once.

I mentioned a few moments ago, Rixstep and they had a look at the imminent release of Windows 7, implying that users should run, not walk to Apple. Or Linux I guess.

Daniel Eran Dilger was on a similar theme last week and he explains why he thinks Windows 7 is not the knight on a white horse that Ballmer is hoping for. He points out Microsoft wants to claim the global recession and claim that Windows 7 is the answer. If so, how do they explain Apple?

And, come to that, Dvorak is heading in the same direction too. I will not link directly to his page as, once again, MacDaily News has much more fun with this, describing Redmond as "a derivative schlock factory headed by an unfocused imbecile". It gets worse. Or better depending on where you stand.

We mentioned recently that Redmond was about to copy Apple with a line of retail stores, including locations, but it gets worse and this is a prime example of the lack of originality that people like Rixstep, Dilger, Mac Daily News and others bemoan: inside the new shops will be, wait for it, not Genius Bars but Guru Bars. Again, head to Mac Daily News for the link and comments.

We did try to be nice to Redmond last week and were impressed with their release of Open Source code. Not so fast. The company was in violation of the General Public Licence and the Register suggests the release was to head off "any potentially embarrassing legal dispute" over any violation. Like the guru bars, they are representing themselves as something they are not.

Likewise, they have had to alter some of those TV ads that included the prices of Apple computers that the actors, or members of the public, depending on whom you believe, said were too expensive and were then handed a sheaf of dollar bills by Bill himself.

Apple's financial reports are notable not just for the figures but what is said there in an environment totally different from MacWorld and the Developer Conferences. In questions afterwards, Peter Oppenheimer let some interesting information loose and this was reported by, among others, John Martellaro at the Mac Observer.

Some of the points are:
• iPod sales were expected to decline and some of this was due to the way people are moving up the line to the iPhone and iPod touch.
• Apple now has $31.1 billion in reserves and they are not going to be purchasing companies with this
• Cash can be used to make better deals, such as the $500 million up front for flash chips from Toshiba.
• Apple is looking at the App Store, especially in terms of app quality.

The whole report makes better reading than my points summary.

Apple has a solid core and is expanding. A good example of that is the way the App Store took off and that has benefits for developers as well as Apple as we have mentioned before, for example with the app, Brushes that did nicely for its developer. Another example, we are told by Dave Rosenberg, is a game called F.A.S.T. Dogfight which in the first 6 weeks of its availability gleaned $1 million.

And if Apple takes 30% that is $300,000 from one application in a relatively short period. If the sales were the same for the whole year Apple would bring in over $2.5 million on just that one app alone. I know we can play statistics till the cows come home, but with 65,000 apps, even though many are free, may are low-priced and quite a few are not really up to much, this may be another cash cow.

There was some less than good news last week over the apparent suicide of a FoxConn employee who had been questioned about a missing iPhone prototype. FoxConn handed the whole thing over to the Chinese police, and it is not expected that the relationship between the company and Apple will change. At least, not just at the moment. I wonder who needs whom most.

The tablet rumour appears again and this week's chapter has some information from the highly regarded Boy Genius Report, who suggest that Apple is to join with Verizon in this project. That would tie in with those other rumours suggesting Apple is moving away from AT&T, and they could do it with a new product like a tablet without breaking any agreements of course. My own views on this are less positive. I just cannot see it happening, but I have of course been wrong many times before, but as Boy Genius reminds us this rumour has come from the direction of Jim Cramer's pals. Insanely Great Mac have another version of this story and suggest a launch date some time in 2010.

However an item on the Register on Monday evening, suggested that the date had been moved forward to September 2009, which I think is unlikely for two reasons: Apple is at risk if a product is released too early, for example some people here who don't buy Macs warn people never to buy version 1; and September is already booked by Apple for the release of Snow Leopard. Mac Observer's, Jeff Gamet followed this with a story that seems to have originated with the Financial Times (which he cites). This just adds to the hype about this mythical device -- not Gamet's fault -- and adds a price range of $600 to $1,000 which is way too high in my opinion, plus it would eat into MacBook Pro and iPod touch sales among others.

A sort of sting in the tail comes here with news that Verizon has its own problems with a 21% profit drop and the layoff of some 8,000 workers about to take place. While AT&T is adding customers, Verizon is not and such a device from Apple might give it the boost it seems to need.

The device is also rumoured to be linked to a new service from record companies, called Cocktail and I am in no doubt this will not be coming to Thailand any time before the next Ice Age (and I don't mean the movie either). Greg Sandoval at CNET has some more on this; and part of the philosophy behind it is because the record companies still think 99c a track is not enough. Again, I have my doubts on this -- there are too many rumours about wild plans involving Apple at the moment. We shall see.

Charles Moore at Low End Mac also has some considerable thoughts on the subject and suggests that the device would have the trimmed down OS X of the iPhone rather than the full Mac version. There are some other ideas concerning pricing and the way it would use apps. I hope so.

Later News

An example of this catching up concerns another item on Microsoft. In a brilliant piece of originality, Redmond is about to open an online app store for Windows Mobiles. One year after Apple's own app store was open and they are ready to accept submissions, but from only 29 countries and Thailand, of course, is not one. Never mind, you can join the Apple iPhone developer program and that may well last longer and prove more profitable.

Something thrown into the mix is a report by Ina Fried that Microsoft is again sniffing round Yahoo! and that, she suggests, we may hear something real soon. I get the idea that this sort of deal would have the same type of effect as the link between Time-Warner and AOL a few years back and would be just another module that Redmond added on with little proper integration.

Although on AOL, in a timely manner, Time Warner has just bought Google's 5% for a discount of $726m. It cost Google $1b in 2003 and Time-Warner got it for the bargain basement price of $283m. Paradoxically, and proof that I do not understand economics and finance, John Oates of the Register tells us they have to buy this back before they can spin AOL off as an independent company.

We also hear some more about the death of the Foxconn worker, by Jeff Gamet again, but this time in the iPod Observer. They claim that the unfortunate Mr. Danyong, had a record of poor equipment handling. The company has paid his family $44,000, which is a fair sum in this part of the world and gave his girlfriend an Apple laptop. That last bit cheapens it methinks. I am sure there will be more on this.

Within an hour or so of writing that, Geek Sugar put out an item mentioning that FoxConn have been in the spotlight before over working conditions. If this is par for the course, then Apple needs to distance itself, but so do Nintendo, Amazon, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Sony before anyone starts putting this out as an Apple-only problem.

And Foxconn is named as one of those that the rumours insist are going to be responsible for the iTablet or whatever name we give it this week. Also named in the Register article by James Sherwood are Wintek, and Dynapack.

A last word -- or last headline -- on this from Insanely Great Mac who suggest that the "Latest rumors put Apple tablet launch sometime between any week and never."

Still in China, there are reports that finally Apple and China Unicom have agreed on the iPhone and it will be arriving in that part of Asia late September. No word on that wifi rumour we heard a few weeks ago. Apparently this is a preliminary agreement.

With the recent update to iTunes, the Palm Pré was locked out and some Apple critics are citing this as another example of Cupertino turning into a big bad wolf. Palm had been warned before the Pré was released that they were using code that was not theirs and Apple may just be protecting its property rather than, say, suing Palm.

You are also going to hear about the way a Google Voice app has been blocked from the app store, although it can be used as a web app. Big bad Apple? No, AT&T didn't want this one. Jason Kincaid's semi-speculation has now been confirmed by other sources.

Talking of updates, there were some suggestions Wednesday morning that 10.5.8 is imminent.

I see in the Business Post on Wednesday morning that Western Digital, citing an upturn in the global economy are hiring lots of new staff at their factories in Thailand; which matches what Delta Electronics were also reporting recently: when the accessory guys start hiring, things are starting to look up.

And Apple shares are shown at $160 exactly on my stocks widget Wednesday morning, with the weather widget showing rain, rain every day for the next 6 days, except for Sunday. . . .

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