Washington Times: Laptops Polish Apple's Image - Superb Values

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Washington Times: Laptops Polish Apple's Image - Superb Values

Nov
22

By: switchtoamac at: 10:25 PM on November 22, 2006 | Comments (1)

In a November 21, 2006 article, Mark Kellner writing for The Washington Times says the recently updated MacBook and MacBook Pro models are "superb values".

A few key quotes from the article:

"Within the past two weeks, Apple has upgraded the Intel processors in two of its portables, the MacBook and MacBook Pro, offering greater speed at the same price as earlier models."

"If the former computers were good values, the new models are superb values worth considering for an end-of-year purchase or for holiday gift giving"

"The MacBook Pro, with its 15-inch screen and 2.33 gigahertz Intel Core 2 Duo processors, would be a very good choice for many traveling business people."

"Along with size and a marginally more powerful CPU chip than the smaller MacBook sent for review, what's nice about the MacBook Pro is its made-for-business styling, the ability to handle up to 3 GB of RAM, or 50 percent more than a maxed-out MacBook, and a better graphics card, ATI's Mobility Radeon X1600, with 256 megabytes of dedicated RAM. In contrast, the MacBook uses an Intel graphics processor that shares 64 MB of RAM with the main system memory."

"The MacBook, with which I fell in love last summer while toting one around southwestern Turkey, is back in a new and improved model with a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo chip and up to 2 GB of RAM and a 160-GB hard disk drive, all this for $1,774 from Apple"

"Other features of the MacBook work very nicely, including the built-in Wi-Fi antenna and ISight camera. Sound quality is very good, and there are enough ports to connect a range of peripherals. My earlier endorsement of both MacBook models, basic and Pro, stands, and is enhanced with more bang for your computing buck. Oh, and do I need to remind you that with Parallels Workstation software, you can run Microsoft Windows (if needed) alongside the Mac OS?"

You can read the article in it's entirety here.

Switch To A Mac Commentary
Note that one can also run Windows on a Mac via Apple's Boot Camp beta software.

1 Reader Comments

roddor on: November 23, 2006 8:19 PM said:

I love the way you present mac related news.
Many articles out there make you read lots of introductory material before getting to the point. Your quoting the core of those articles saves me a lot of reading time without losing the real thing.
Your final commentaries are very interesting too.

I would think increasing the amount of material here daily covered might well increase your reading audience. Congratulations for a good work.

Still remember your surprisingly accurate prediction of Mac sales for last Q3CY. Some analysts are talking of 14.5m iPods for Q4CY, but this seems to be influenced by the perception that the market is reaching the point of saturation.

IMHO there are now many reasons that should again propel spectacular sales growth:
1. iPod sales growth in previous quarters slowed down because the white-only nano stayed too long whithout significant changes, in addition to the battery and easy-to-scratch problems.
2. The new multi-color aluminum nano plus the cute shuffle together with price reductions.
3. Increased iPod awareness among consumers compared to last year-end after nearly 70m iPods sold.
4. A recent poll reports some 70% of sales people recommending iPods when asked for a gift suggestion, compared to around 40% a year ago (figures approximated).
5. Increased number of Apple stores, 170 stores now, and external retail channels.

All that said, and considering Apple sold 14m iPods in Q4 2005, twice as much in Q3, IMHO sales for this quarter should reach over 17m.

But I would really like to know what are your estimations. Have I missed any recent STAM sales projection for this quarter?
Regards, Rod.