Since it's Sunday, I don't want to keep you with long stories. After all, there have been a bunch of interesting news last week, and if you missed them, you know what to do... Today, I will highlight an interesting fact, something that everyone expected to happen sooner or later, and now it's finally happening - iPods are manufactured in smaller numbers, while Macs production is going up!


This is not my imagination, and it's not a rumor I read somewhere on the Web, either. In fact, it all comes from the Bank of America investment firm, which made some checks with their sources located in the Far East, where Apple's hardware is manufactured, and the information they got from there lead them into believing iPod production has been lowered, while Steve Jobs' company ramped up the production of Macs, at the same time.

Well, I was expecting this to happen since Leopard came up. Being given the excellent market performance and customer satisfaction of this latest Mac OS X version, combined with Vista's problems, it's something normal to see a lot of people making the switch to the Macs.

The numbers go like this - compared to early January estimations, Mac desktops and notebooks production is about 20 percent higher, while the quantity of iPods expected to be manufactured in the March quarter is over 30 percent lower compared to early December estimations, and about 20 percent, when looking back at the estimations done in early January.

Unfortunately, it seems I was right to say I wouldn't bet my life on seeing Leopard updated last month, because it's February already and the patch didn't arrive yet. Anyway, there's no need to worry, because Apple is working hard on it, and today I just found out about a new proof of this fact - earlier this week, the developer community got another pre-release of the upcoming update from the Cupertino-based company...

Just like the one that came before it, Mac OS X 10.5.2 build 9C27, the current build of the soon-to-be-released update, seems to be free of known issues. Since there were no bugs to fix, all that can be said about this last build is that 9C27 managed to add a few more improvements to the list that already exceeds the 130 new features/improvements mark.

According to those familiar with the latest Mac OS X builds for the developer community, the list of improvements now included various fixes to Leopard's Finder sidebar, new desktop backgrounds, support for the new Time Capsule backup appliance, iChat Bluetooth functionality, as well as disk space management and improvements to the Time Machine software.

Leaving the above aside, Apple's efforts seem to concentrate their attention of system core components, such as Bluetooth, Audio Input, the Finder, Spotlight and the graphics drivers, these being the items they asked developers to focus their testing efforts on.

I know there's one big question remaining, but I don't have a straight answer to that. Last news I heard place the release to the public of this update during this month, so let's keep our fingers crossed...

Although it may seem unreal to some, I think Gartner's prediction regarding Apple's market share growth in the coming years should prove accurate, when the time to draw the line comes. While the reason may not be Apple's performance itself, since Microsoft's failure to deliver an OS able to draw more users, or at least keep existing ones, also pushes Apple's sales forward, the future looks bright for the Cupertino-based company. How bright? Let's see the expectations...

At this time, Apple Inc.'s share of the US personal computer market is pushing its way past the 6.1 percent mark, with Leopard's good performance and excellent customer satisfaction rate, as well as the company's increasing popularity, being two solid reasons behind this evolution, combined with Microsoft's "help" that I just mentioned above.

In the future, it is expected for Apple's market share to go above 12 percent (in the US, as I said already), but Gartner also predicted in its raport called "Key Predictions for IT Organisations and Users in 2008 and Beyond" that Apple's market share of the Western Europe computer market should double by 2011.

At last, one very interesting prediction of the report named above is that, by 2012, 80 percent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology. These being said, I hope we won't collide with any comet in the near future, because otherwise, the coming years look pretty interesting, at least when talking about the IT field...

Apple's iTunes was always in a close battle with its counterpart from RealNetworks, that one being RealPlayer, of course. Despite their rather uninspired proprietary media format, RealNetworks managed to hang on in there and keep the second position on the media streaming market, after Microsoft's Windows Media Player, but things have just changed...

According to recent studies, the situation looks like this: Windows Media Player - 76 million, iTunes - 36 million, and RealPlayer - 27 million. Obviously, we are talking about the number of users each of these players has...

It's pretty clear that Media Player's growth has one main reason, and that is the fact that Microsoft had the (very good, I must admit) idea of making it a part of its Windows operating systems, but how did iTunes managed to get a steady growth?

Well, let's think a bit - now they have movie rentals, and Apple TV "Take 2" is going to arrive pretty soon, an event that may boost iTunes usage even higher, and we shouldn't forget about the inspired move Apple made when decided to make QuickTime and iTunes available for the Windows platform too (that's an ancient story, anyway, but I think it is worth being mentioned here).

Other than the above, I must confess that I used RealPlayer only when I had to, and that didn't happen too often. Also, the existence of completely ad-free programs such as RealAlternative had its part in slowly pushing back RealPlayer's popularity...

At last, let's congratulate Apple for this success and hope that, maybe, one day in the future... you know what I am thinking about, so I don't have to say more!