Mac Keeps Outperforming Overall PC Industry

We got a feeling Mac computers were reporting strong sales and health on every Apple’s quarterly conference call, but having to deal with the raw data of the Mac’s growth over the past 19 quarters is a different story. As reported by All Things Digital, the Mac has outpaced the PC market again in December 2010, for the 19th consecutive quarter, in every market segment. We’re talking business and enterprise customers, consumer market, government. While the PC industry has reported negative numbers over the years (first the recession, then the second coming of tablets), the Mac has simply kept growing.

In the global home or consumer market, the Mac posted shipment growth of 17.1 percent, while the broader market posted a decline of .6 percent. In the business market, Mac shipments grew 65.4 percent compared to the market growth rate of 9.7 percent. And in government, they grew 549.5 percent compared to the broader market’s 8.4 percent.

With the stunning adoption rate of iOS devices since 2007, the fact that the Mac hasn’t stop selling doesn’t come as a surprise. After all, what we’re seeing here is Apple selling not a line of notebooks or desktop machines, but an experience. And the millions of people that bought an iPhone or iPad in the past years are likely attracted by this integrated ecosystem Apple is so heavily investing on. Sure, Macs can perfectly live on their own without being used in conjunction with iOS, but apparently consumers like the possibility of being part of an ecosystem. And so the Mac keeps growing.

Confessions of an Apple Store Employee→

Confessions of an Apple Store Employee

Things like this are always interesting and worth a reading session in Instapaper. An anonymous Apple Store employee talked to Popular Mechanics, detailing some of the little known facts about Apple’s retail environment. Some juicy bits below.

About product launches:

We are completely in the dark until they do a keynote speech. We have no idea what is coming and are not allowed to openly speculate.

On MobileMe’s popularity:

We’re supposed to sell AppleCare product support with just about everything, and honestly, those aren’t that hard to sell, since they aren’t a bad deal. But we’re also supposed to push MobileMe, and that’s really hard to sell. Nobody ever sells it.

The weird part about Apple’s philosophy:

Sometimes the company can feel like a cult. Like, they give us all this little paper pamphlet, and it says things like—and I’m paraphrasing here—”Apple is our soul, our people are our soul.” Or “We aim to provide technological greatness.” And there was this one training session in which they started telling us how to work on our personality, and separating people into those with an external focus and an internal focus. It was just weird.

Read the full interview here.

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OpenFeint Connect Promises Cross-Platform Integration, But No Simultaneous Play

It looks like mobile gaming OpenFeint has no intention on leaving all the fun to Apple’s Game Center. In fact, OpenFeint has become more than a simple alternative to the Game Center with cross-platform integration (OpenFeint works on Android devices, too) and in-app purchasable content that’s not tied to App Store approval. The service sports 65 million users and it’s about to expand a lot more with the upcoming launch of OpenFeint Connect.

Connect will allow iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, OS X and Windows users to communicate through the OpenFeint platform, share leaderboards and achievements as if everyone was playing the same game on the same device or computer. In fact, Connect could also work with Facebook games and a plethora of other online gaming services. Unfortunately though, simultaneous cross-platform play won’t be possible (guess it’s a little tricky to implement real-time multiplayer on iOS vs. Android).

A private beta of OpenFeint Connect is available here for developers who want to experiment with the API. [via Download Squad]

Daily Notes for iPad Makes A Comeback with Tasks, Dropbox Support

Daily Notes was one of the first apps to adopt a custom interface on the iPad back in the days when iPad apps were a novelty. Reviewed by Cody Fink in May 2010 (a month after the release of the tablet, and the grand opening of the iPad App Store), the app sported an intriguing faux-leather UI that allowed you to organize and schedule your daily events and priorities as if you were using a real agenda. Cody wrote:

Daily Notes is a more traditional styled notebook with lots of calendars built in. Seriously, you cannot miss a date wherever you turn. Asides from what could be overdoing it, Daily Notes has a couple great features built in, but also shows some odd design decisions that need ironing out. Despite some minor gripes, this is probably one of the best looking notepad applications currently available on the iTunes App Store, offering a fair level of organization, note tracking, privacy, and customization.

After a few months of silence, the app is making a comeback today into the App Store with a brand new version 4.0 that comes with several new features like backup through Dropbox and TextExpander integration. Together with that (and I’m sure being able to create daily notes through TextExpander snippets will be appreciated by many) the app can now organize tasks into a dedicated tab and has full multitasking support. But there’s more. You can switch between 30 different themes and 80 fonts, browse fullscreen photo attachments and insert multiple notes per day.

Daily Notes is chock-full of features, but I wish the interface was a little more streamlined. Admittedly, some users might find sections and calendar views confusing at first – thus the implementation of a tutorial when you first launch the app. Still, this is a truly complete app that I hope will get support for more online services in the future. Go check it out here.

MANsaver: The iPhone App That Will Save Your Relationship

It is no secret that men usually forget about things. Especially if you’re married and you have to think about paying the bills, your job, kids and that car insurance that just won’t go away, it might happen to forget about your 4th anniversay, the perfect gift for Valentine’s Day, or the anniversary of the day your first met with your wife. While girls seem to remember any kind of holiday, anniversary and important milestone with ease, guys…well, usually just forget. And if your relationship is anything like mine, you know this could become a problem. Like, a huge problem.

Now, for as silly as it sounds, we there’s an app for that. MANsaver, a free iPhone app by Oven Bits and Creation Code, is aimed at collecting all these kinds of holidays and anniversaries you should remember into a single list view that – and here comes the real trick – will also send you notifications five days ahead of a scheduled event, and on the same day as well. This app, also nicely designed, is literally a man saver: it allows you to build custom lists of dates based on your relationship, set up reminders and even send text messages based on “romantic templates”. This is an iPhone geek’s relationship-oriented OmniFocus, basically. Read more

Gamerami Serves News, Upcoming Game Info On Demand

Growing up, I was a subscriber of Nintendo Power and the later (manlier) Game Informer as I grew into my predestined Xbox phase. High school was great for zombie killing, but between college and MacStories I’ve little time to play or let alone get a heads up about the latest upcoming games. Gamerami is a mobile news stand that makes sifting through the latest titles easy and rather painless, and it just might save your butt when you’re on the spot. At least now I don’t look like a total nobody when I’m asked what cool & new games are coming out on the PS3.

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“Pixels: The Art of iPhone Photography”

Attention budding iPhoneographers, think you can shoot some mean pixels with your iPhone? Addicted to photo apps like Instagram, Camera+ and Hipstamatic? Why not test your creative ability and submit some of your own original works of art?

The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, or OCCCA, in Santa Ana, California, is opening an exhibit from March 31 to April 20, 20111 called “Pixels: The Art of iPhone Photography.” If you are interested in participating, here are the rules: all photos must be shot and processed with your iDevice (iPhone and iPod Touch devices are both acceptable) and you cannot use any photo editing software on a desktop computer. Read more

Today In Apple Patents: Dense Lithium Cells, iOS Controls via Smart Bezels

Two patents uncovered today by AppleInsider and Patently Apple give us some insight on technologies and features Apple might implement in future MacBooks and iOS devices. Smart bezels (a subject we’ve covered before) make a comeback today in a patent that describes how tablets could benefit from losing physical buttons and delegating functions like volume and brightness adjustment to touch-sensitive hardware parts running around the screen of a device. Read more