We knew that the NPD Group had no plans to share the split between the sales of the DS Lite and the DSi this month, but it’s clear that Nintendo’s new hardware is doing some serious business. The Nintendo DS platform, as a whole, accounted for 31 percent of the sales in April. That’s not bad for a system many dismissed as a costly retread.
Apple recently sold 1 billion iPhone apps through its highly successful App Store. Now, awell-reasoned analysis from Lightspeed Venture Partners suggests Apple might have pulled in as much as $45 million in revenue for those 1 billion apps. But does that mean Apple is actually making money from the App Store?
The International Energy Agency is a multinational group that tracks global energy use and makes projections of how current trends are likely to influence future supply and demand. Its latest report, released on Wednesday, is entitled Gadgets and Gigawatts. Not surprisingly, it focuses on consumer products, but it tells two very different tales. For appliances like dishwashers and refrigerators, energy use has been plunging in part due to government efficiency incentives, and that plunge has been accompanied by dropping prices. For electronic gadgets, in contrast, nothing is being done, and the growth in the electrical demand they’re generating will put severe strain on future power supplies if business as usual continues.
When we last took an in-depth look at USB flash drives in 2005, the landscape
was a bit different. A 2GB
drive ran nearly $200, and speeds were quite a bit slower then. At the time, we noted
that while the then-current crop of drives was pretty fast, they
still were not close to saturating the bandwidth of USB2. To top it
off, a good drive was still going to set you back $50 or $70—not exactly a cheap proposition. Since our first roundup, this picture has changed considerably, and it leads to a question: has the flash drive become
an undifferentiated commodity, just like any other cheap plastic tsotschke that you might find at an office supply store checkout counter?
Apple has released another new batch of “Get a Mac” ads, just a few weeks after four ads were last aired. This series of three ads seems to address Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunters” series more directly than the previous ones, and with more wit, too.
When we last took an in-depth look at USB flash drives in 2005, the landscape
was a bit different. A 2GB
drive ran nearly $200, and speeds were quite a bit slower then. At the time, we noted
that while the then-current crop of drives was pretty fast, they
still were not close to saturating the bandwidth of USB2. To top it
off, a good drive was still going to set you back $50 or $70—not exactly a cheap proposition. Since our first roundup, this picture has changed considerably, and it leads to a question: has the flash drive become
an undifferentiated commodity, just like any other cheap plastic tsotschke that you might find at an office supply store checkout counter?
Although the Obama administration is indicating that it will be more aggressive about enforcing antitrust regulations, the European Union has been pursuing high-profile cases for years, having levied a large fine against Microsoft back in 2004, and hitting the software giant again last year. The latest target of the EU’s Competition group is the chipmaker Intel and, this morning, the EU announced that it too would face a hefty fine: slightly over 1 billion, which comes in just shy of $1.5 billion. Intel is already promising to appeal but, in the meantime, it’s going to have to drop over half a year of its current profits into a bank account in case its appeal fails.
Potential iPhone buyers can once again order the device online to be shipped directly to their doorsteps. Apple updated its website today with a page that takes orders right from the Web. It’s like the late-90s all over again!
After being rumored as far back as January of last year, announced over a year ago, and successfully demonstrated at Macworld Expo earlier this year, SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone is now available for your App Store purchasing pleasure. While it offers excellent remote access to Slingbox hardware and the content it serves, the $30 price tag seems a little too high, especially given that AT&T forced Sling Media to cripple the software and block 3G network access.
IDC’s first quarter numbers are out for PC processors, and the picture is not a pretty one for Intel. There is typically a seasonal sequential decline in processor sales in the first quarter of any given year, and 2009 was no exception. The sequential decline this year was slightly worse than normal, but not catastrophically so, reflecting a slowing in the pace of the PC market’s collapse. As Intel pointed out on its recent earnings call, the total free-fall in sales appears to be over, but things are still on a downslope.
