Mac

Lately the forums have picked up quite a bit of traffic so we have been getting more and more good conversations. Today on the forums is no exception.

First up we have forum regular cjvitek. More than likely if you are reading this you have your own iPhone, well what is your choice of computer? Mac? Windows? Chime in and vote in the poll!

It's been a while since our last Today on the Forums post, but hopefully today's topics will make up for it.

Today on the forums we have some great ideas from Alienwhere, who would like to see some more integration with his iPhone and his Mac. I agree... Check out some of his ideas and add to them if you can.

We told you that today's earnings would be thin on iPhone details and that is definitely the case. Apple's just posted their 3rd quarter results and the results are: dizzang!

Dig the full results (minus the legal speak) after the break. Here's the short version: a record number of Macs were sold, just shy of 2.5 million, which works out to about 41% growth year over year, 43% revenue growth. That's ALottaMacs, friends, and it helped Apple hit a quarterly profit of over a billion dollars on $7.46 billion in revenue -- both significant increases over the same quarter last year. Margins were down a hair, but whatev -- Apple's selling Macs, dig?

We can't wait to see what the financial results are for iPhone sales (they'll come next quarter), but we have a sneaking suspicion that numbers like these mean that the just-dandy sales for iPhones 2 quarters ago have translated into quite a few people getting interested in replacing a PC with a Mac. As Mac-users ourselves, we welcome you folks to the fold. Are you a recent switcher? Was it the Halo effect? Is your new iPhone 3G spotting a shiny halo that has you thinking Mac for your next purchase?

MacRumors is reporting that tonight's financial results from Apple aren't going to contain a whole lot of crunchy iPhone goodness. The news is based on a Bloomberg report that points out that Apple's last quarter ended before the iPhone 2.0 software update was available, Apple doesn't count those sales towards revenue. Likely if they had, they might have had to go all Sarbanes-Oxley on us and charge for that update. That might be fine for iPod owners, but iPhone owners have had enough of hidden costs lately.

So I ventured out to an Apple Store yesterday hoping that since the iPhone 3G was a couple days old that I could easily grab one. No, not for me. For the girlfriend and my sister. I could have gone to the AT&T store only a few blocks away but whenever Apple releases a new product I prefer the full Apple experience at an Apple Store (Brea, CA); it’s just more complete that way. Expecting to get some hands on time with the iPhone 3G and pick up the Macbook Air again, I was pretty excited to get to the store.

As I cheerily walked through the mall eagerly anticipating the iPhone 3G, I stopped dead in my tracks. There was at least a 100-person line that stretched multiple storefronts! The Apple Store Employee ‘in-charge’ estimated the line to be a 5-hour wait! This was a Monday afternoon, didn’t people have work to do?

But it gets better (read: worse).

Read on for the rest of this very weird Apple Store Experience!

MacRumors has discovered that though you receive your MobileMe email very quickly, the "pushing" of other MobileMe services is not as fast when coming from your Mac. Apple's knowledgebase article states:

This is it. We're in the home stretch. Games in overtime, the shot clock is almost done, and Steve Jobs is soaring from mid-court looking for the slam dunk. In 3 days we find out if Apple brings down the net, the two-peat for smartphone (even gadget) championship, or if they bounce it off the rim (pun sorta intended) with their mostly evolutionary, not so much revolutionary, next generation handset.

Saturday we mentioned one big change: the fast 3G data chip. Sunday it was GPS. Monday we tackled the 2.0 Firmware update. Today we're looking at the rebirth of .Mac: MobileMe.

Note: .Mac users have been able to send to username@me.com for a few days already, and as of yesterday, July 7, could both send and receive using me.com. (Just tried it out and it works!)

Now word comes that, to accommodate New Zealand, which due to their time zone gets the iPhone 3G way before anyone else, Apple has announced that it's really not 3 days to MobileMe -- just one! That's right, MobileMe goes live on Wednesday, July 9 between 6pm and 12am PST. Mark your calendars, then get ready to "push" sync them!

Why should you want to? Read on after the break!

.Mac has been up and down again over the last few days, which is nothing new, but this time it seems like the transition to MobileMe might actually have begun. Some people are reportedly able to receive mail at the me.com version of their alias (meaning name@mac.com is already mapping to name@me.com for some).

I just tried it, and received an "illegal alias" error for my trouble. Is it working yet for you?

Read

Woke up this morning and as per my usual modus operandi, checked mail on my iPhone and then went to read some feeds. That's when it happened, mobile.mac.com (the interceptive RSS reading feature on MobileSafari) came back with a server error.

Seems to be working for me again, but reports have since sprung up of others having trouble with web-bound services of .Mac (though email protocols seems fine).

During the 2008 WWDC Keynote today, Apple VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, confirmed the rumors of a .Mac maga-revamp in the form of MobileMe.

Apple's answer both to previous critiques of the admittedly out-dated .Mac service, and the expected cloud computing boom (see Android, Google), MobileMe features ActiveSync-like "push" email, calendar, and contacts syncing between your iPhone (or iPod Touch) and your Mac or PC, or via any web browser with some pretty spectacular looking Web 2.0/AJAX style online apps. It also adds photo syncing, clearly targeting consumers.