The NEW Apple 2005. It’s All About The Numbers.

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See the numbers lining up? Microsoft is weakened. Apple is strengthened and growing. The numbers are now in favor of the Mac maker because the company has learned how to peel an onion.

Peeling By The Numbers
Think of the layers of an onion. The outer layers are rough and shed easily. The warm, moist, tasty part of an onion is in the middle. The onion’s skin has to be removed first.

Then, layer by layer, the entire onion can be revealed (for whatever insidious purpose you may have for said vegetable).

Steve Jobs and company are peeling the onion. Layer by layer we’re seeing it now unfold clearly before our eyes (and our checkbooks).

The move from Mac OS 9.x to Mac OS X. Jaguar. Panther. Soon Tiger. The move from fruity colored iBooks, iMacs, and PowerMacs, to a professional, sturdy, aluminum and white plastic product.

iTunes. Then the iPod. Then the iTunes Music Store. First on the Mac, then on Windows.

iLife is the digital hub, now expanded by the addition of Garageband. And a price tag. Even iWork is part of the layered onion from Apple.

First it’s just Pages and Keynote. Next year it’ll be Pages, Keynote, and (my prediction) “Numbers,” a spreadsheet we can be proud of and fully integrated within iWork.

Numbers.

The Mac mini - Redux
More numbers. The Mac mini is not designed and marketed as an iMac G5—premium and sleek and designed to make everyone who does have one a little more envious (so we can be smug and all).

The Mac mini is designed for numbers. Big numbers.

Apple needs to sell a lot of Mac mini’s. They’ll sell in big numbers to current Mac users who already love the most recent generation Macs. The mini will also sell in big numbers to the Mac installed base who haven’t upgraded to Mac OS X yet.

More importantly, the Mac mini needs to (and will) sell in big numbers to those millions of disgruntled, unhappy, dissatisfied, and tortured Windows users.

Layer by layer. By mid-summer Apple may have sold a couple million or more of the Mac mini. Then along comes Mac OS X Tiger.

Those Mac mini users will want to, and will, upgrade to Tiger. For another $129. More numbers for Apple.

By the end of the year, if not sooner, but certainly by Macworld 2006, another onion layer will be removed and further empty some numbers from our checking accounts or increase our credit card balances.

iFlix.

Yes, it might be iFlicks, or the iMovie Store, or whatever. Once a few million new, easy-to-use, and inexpensive Mac mini’s hit the streets, and broadband useage numbers continue to grow, and H.264 hits the streets (high quality video, low file size), you can bet on Apple to deliver a movie addition to iTMS.

Why was the President of Sony on stage with Steve Jobs at Macworld? Numbers. HD numbers. It’s coming and it’s H.264, the new standard in video compression that’ll show up on HD-DVD and BlueRay DVD (may the best man win).

Oh, did I mention that QuickTime 7 (don’t you just love those numbers?) will also handle H.264?

Oh, wait. There’s more. Did I mention that iChat AV in the upcoming Tiger will also use H.264 for video and audio?

Apple and Sony sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

Sony is banking heavily on the new HD products to take the nation by storm. And Apple wants to be the box you use to plug into that new Sony HD TV.

What? How’s that possible? Did you notice that many HD LCD TV’s are coming with DVI connectors these days? Did you also notice that the Mac mini comes with a DVI video connector.

Hmmm. Coincidence? I think not. At $499, a Mac mini will find a spot near many new LCD TVs—next to or replacing the DVD Player, perhaps the DVR/PVR player, maybe even the stereo system.

It’s All In The Numbers

It’s in the numbers. Apple is rolling in the cash numbers; revenue numbers, profit, numbers, and units shipped numbers. Market share numbers are on the rise. The market share numbers for music players are staggering. No one is close.

The iTunes Music Store has already sold over 250-million songs. Did you notice that NO ONE ELSE is mentioning how many songs they’ve sold on their online download stores?

Once the number of Mac mini’s is sufficient, look for more numbers from downloadable movies from Apple. Sony movies. Pixar movies. And many others.

It’s all in the numbers. 2005 will be a great year for Apple, for Mac users, and finally, some good news for Windows users.