Fair enough, but I have more information than most people on the subject of Apple, especially during the period of the cube, when the company I worked for was providing graphics chips for it. That system wasn't a failure. It didn't meet certain expectations and it had some issues that didn't warrant continuing the line. One thing was they wanted to make a smaller system.



The AppleTV is what I consider their biggest missed opportunity. I just don't think the top brass cares enough yet about TV on an actual TV. When it was released, for me, it was a big "meh" moment. I knew the market wasn't ready for this type of product and that Apple would have had to offer a lot more to try and establish the market themselves. I really have no clue why they released it when they did, without content deals for HD material in place, without the hardware/platform supporting HDCP, based on an NVIDIA chip that can't decode and play back 1080p.



What they "should" have done was wait two more years to release it. Then they could have done something that didn't entail essentially building a cut-down Mac, which is the primary reason keeping its costs high.

It has done and is doing exactly as well as one would expect given the attention Apple gives to it and the effort they expend on it as a platform, including marketing and promotion. It sells, but it will never be stellar because they're not pushing it to be. I don't really think they're that bothered with its sales, or they'd likely have developed something new or canned it entirely. I think they can still do damage in this market segment, but it won't be as easy to capture the "wow" factor as it would have if they hadn't yet released anything.



Handbrake. But yeah, that shouldn't be necessary. Apple just doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about doing video as well as they've done audio. But there's a reason. A very important reason. When they started with audio they wanted to make sure everyone could easily get their existing audio onto their hardware. Now one of their goals is selling you the video. Making it super easy to put other video on their device is somewhat contrary to their service/distribution goals. No one else has done demonstrably better in this hardware market. I do believe that 2010 is the year where this category will start to hit the mainstream however. Many eyes are on Boxee right now.



Mention it all you want, but it's silly and doesn't give any points to anyone who does. It's an accessory. Like the socks. It's not "worth" mentioning, thats why I said what I did. I doubt it lost Apple any money on its development and sales though. It was a stupid thing to release seeing as the accessory market was already quite well stocked. It's similar to BMW coming out with their own tires. Incidentally, it was announced along side the Intel Mac mini. It's hardly a fit comparison to a flag-ship product like the Mac, iPod itself or the iPhone.



We're talking 3-4 million by the end of this year. I can't see it possibly eclipsing iPhone sales in the short term (2-3 years). That device class is just a super high unit class. People will replace their phones yearly, even if those phones cost $500-700. They don't typically do it with a computer and I don't think they're going to be doing it with the tablet class of device either.

While I suspect Apple may do 3 million this year, I don't think anyone else will come even close to 1M. If the JooJoo comes out for instance, I'd be surprised if they sold 5000 units by December 31st.

Also, don't call me an Apple apologist. No one needs to apologize for Apple, including Apple themselves. They've consistently performed better than any tech company in the world quarter after quarter. They've got the highest stock price and highest market cap of any computer company (excluding Microsoft which is a software company). I mean, they're just doing amazingly well, period. They have enough cash to buy Adobe two times over and shove Flash up its collective asses.