Thanks for joining us on the 2009 Apple review, a look back at this year’s news about the
company.
2009 was a good year for Apple with a bevy of new products including new MacBooks, iPods
and a new iPhone. It also saw the return of CEO Steve Jobs. Financials for the tech giant
were strong, with its stock price more than doubling.
We’ll start our review with the return of Steve Jobs to the company he co-founded. After
a mysterious absence, we learned that Jobs’ health problems related to pancreatic cancer
required him to have a liver transplant. At the Apple music event where the company launched
new iPods, Jobs stepped out of being the traditional company pitchman and addressed his illness,
organ donation and gave thanks to his company.
I'm very happy to be here today with you all. As some of you know, about five months ago
I had a liver transplant. I now have the liver of a mid-20s person who died in a car crash
and was generous enough to donate their organs. I am alive because of their generosity. I
hope we can all be that generous. I'd like to thank everyone in the Apple community for
their concern. It means a lot. I'd like to thank Tim Cook, and everyone at Apple who
rose to the occasion. Thank you guys.
Turning back to business, Jobs introed a number of new and improved iPods. The most noticeable
feature on the updated Nano was the addition of a video camera. It was an indication that
Apple’s trying to keep up with a number of companies offering pocket videocameras
such as Cisco’s Flip and Kodak’s Zi8. But while the Flip, Zi8 and others offer HD
video up to 1080p, the Nano video camera only shoots at 640x480, albeit 30 frames per second.
Had Apple offered HD video, the Nano may have bulked up in size, but as it stands now, the
form factor is largely unchanged. The company also added a new iPod touch, the 64 gig version,
but what it didn’t add to the touch was the same video camera present on the Nano.
Apple fans will have to wait and wonder if it will be available in a future revamp.
One of the biggest tech product announcements of the year was the company’s iPhone 3GS.
At Apple’s World Wide Developers conference in San Francisco, product marketing SVP Phil
Schiller filled in for Jobs, who at the time was still on medical leave, and introduced
the phone during his keynote. While the size and shape of the phone was
largely unchanged, much of guts of the phone were upgraded. Users who requested a better
camera were pleased to see one with 3 megapixels that also captures video. On the software
side, the iPhone 3.0 OS added requested features like the ability to cut, copy and paste and
use landscape mode in all key applications. With the updates to the phone and software,
it became apparent that the company was keeping an ear open to consumers.
The launch of the phone in July was what the world has come to expect from an Apple product
launch. While the lines outside of Apple stores may not have been as long as they were 2 years
ago when the original iPhone launched, they were still long enough to make news. Customers
queued for days and one customer even flew from the US to France so that he could have
the phone sooner. Different customers had different reasons for waiting in line. One
in Boston saw the new phone as a challenge.
It has a different processor from the old iPhones so its going to be a new challenge
to hack it…Let’s see I have 2 of these and I have a couple of the old ones at home.
Apple plans to have the phone available in 80 countries by the end of 2009 and according
to their most recent quarterly report, published in October, phones were available in 64 countries.
Two newcomers this year were China and South Korea, which gave very different receptions
to the device. For example, in the first few days after the launch of the iPhone in China,
China Unicom sold just 5,000 units. In South Korea carrier KT received 60,000 online orders
before was officially up for purchase. Part of the reason for slow sales of the phone
in China could be it’s high price, more than 1,000 US dollars for some models, or
the phones lack of Wifi due to government restrictions.
Phones and music players weren’t the only moneymakers for Apple in 2009 though. The
company updated its line of computers as well. At WWDC the company unveiled a new generation
of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. Many of the changes to the notebooks were standard
like faster processors, bigger hard drives, more memory and longer battery lives. Apple
changed up some of the notebooks’ input offerings earning both praise and frustration
from some users. For example, on the 15 inch MacBook Pro the ExpressCard slot was replaced
with an SD card slot to better accommodate users with digital camera. Some favored that
ExpressCard slot to use for 3G connectivity. The 15inch also gained a FireWire800 interface,
but some audio and video pros favor the faster Serial ATA or eSATA interface, an input not
available on any Mac laptop. All in all though those complaints didn’t deter consumers.
In Apple’s 4th quarter earnings report the company said that Mac laptop shipments grew
by about 35 percent year over year.
A revamp of the company’s iMac, MacBook and Mac mini lines happened in October and
what some were expecting didn’t end up happening. The low-end MacBook remained at the $999 mark,
putting an end speculation that the company could have lowered the price to as low as
$699. All of the new iMacs come with a wireless keyboard and a new peripheral from called
the Magic Mouse. The wireless mouse incorporates gesture control similar to what is on Apple’s
multi touch trackpads. You can use a single finger to scroll around. It also supports
swipe gestures. Swiping left with two fingers in Safari will move you back a page. Or in
iPhoto you can move forward or backward in a stack of images.
The company also offered Snow Leopard to users this year, the newest upgrade to OS X. Snow
Leopard allows the OS to take better advantage of multi-core processors and also features
an upgrade to full 64 bit support. On the graphics front, Snow Leopard features OpenCL;
a method of allowing all applications, not just games, to use 3d acceleration. This opens
up the possibility of far more complex calculations to occur in even the simplest of everyday
programs. Snow Leopard went on sale in September, but doesn’t support older machines that
lack Intel processors.
Apple had a strong year on the NASDAQ starting in January with shares trading around 85 US
dollars and ending the year around 200 dollars a share.
And that’s the 2009 Apple Review, be sure to check out our other year end reports. With
reporting by the global correspondents of IDG I’m Nick Barber in Boston.