back to article Apple juggernaut cranks out big, big numbers

In addition to updating its laptop line; providing more details about its July release of the next OS X, Mountain Lion ($19.99); and unveiling the Google-goading iOS 6, set for a fall debut, Apple also tossed around some interesting – and some very, very big – numbers on Monday morning during the keynote to its Worldwide …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    All that and no new Mac Pro

    Seriously, they say they love developers and give them a computer with a basically-discontinued graphics card to work with? Oops.

    1. ThomH

      Re: All that and no new Mac Pro

      On the contrary, Apple launched new Mac Pros today.

      Despite your assertions to the contrary, I think that most developers, like myself, will be insufficient interested even to be able to tell you what's changed.

      1. Ted Treen

        Re: All that and no new Mac Pro

        @ThomH

        Not exactly 'new' Mac Pros:- this is just a minor update:- New Mac Pros & iMacs probably late 2012 or early 2013

        http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/?newsid=3363384

        1. ThomH

          Re: All that and no new Mac Pro

          I still find the assertion that it's impossible to program with a two-year old GPU laughable (though possibly my memory is at fault; did they have programming before 2010?) but it seems Apple have sided with the critics for once. The 'new' text has been removed from the Mac Pro on the official storefront.

  2. Mr_Bungle
    Facepalm

    You missed one

    1,000,000,000,000,000: Pointless Apple articles published on otherwise respected tech sites.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "respected tech sites"

      Links please?

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: You missed one

      400 = number of pounds spent for the honour of carrying a fragile lump of glass and electronics in your pocket when you go out drinking.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: You missed one

        > fragile lump of glass and electronics

        No, no, no, no. It's a 'beautifully engineered' lump of glass and electronics that is almost certainly wrapped in some ugly case to protect it and an 'amazing' retina display covered with a horrible half-peeled-off screen protector.

        Isn't the cost more like 500 quid as well?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Your forgot..

    the 4,200,000,000,000,000 dubious patent claims etc, and barely legal attempts to erradicate teh competition.

  4. ElReg!comments!Pierre
    Boffin

    Trillions, billions, milliards, millions...

    ... methink

  5. Mitoo Bobsworth
    Coat

    This is a bit like that game...

    ..."The one who dies with the most toys wins", only with numbers. Genuine congrats to Apple for their achievments & all that, but waving your numerical 'johnson' around for all to see is a bit tired & juvenile, don't you think?

    1. stanimir

      Re: This is a bit like that game...

      waving your numerical 'johnson'

      marketing always get a hard long number doing all those benchmark presentation, so yeah

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: This is a bit like that game...

      When presenting to an audience of developers, it's not a bad idea to remind them they they are developing for a successful platform, and that they stand a chance of making some money

    3. I think so I am?
      Paris Hilton

      Re: This is a bit like that game...

      oh.....But it's so big and shiny *****

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And one mindless jerk at the helm.

    See above.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: And one mindless jerk at the helm.

      but you're not at the helm....

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Share Price - Never Mind Last Year ..

    .. how about 3 months ago when it was up at $640 ..?

    And which way d'you think it's going to go over the next 3 - 6 months with saturated markets and no shiny, new toys in the pipeline?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    No answer for 1m Android activations every day then..

    Just baffle dumb Apple owners with bigger but meaningless numbers. Muddy the water and let them carry on believing.

    1. jai

      Re: No answer for 1m Android activations every day then..

      because the activation itself generates so much money, much more than apps or messages or any of the other stats, right?

      activations just show a phone has been enabled, that's half the story. if there's 900,000 activations, but 1,000,000 old phone go silent every day, that's a totally different statistic.

      But knowing the number of people that are using a platform to purchase apps and use features, that's a statistic that a developer wants to know. it's useless to a dev if 900,000 phones are activated but none of them download an app, or just re-download it because they purchased it for their old phone.

    2. Ted Treen
      Facepalm

      Re: No answer for 1m Android activations every day then..

      "...bigger but meaningless numbers..."??

      Like 1,000,000 Android activations per day?

      30,000,000 per month??

      Nearly 400,000,000 per year???

      Seems it's not only Apple owners to whom the epithet "dumb" can be applied...

    3. Seanie Ryan
      Boffin

      Re: No answer for 1m Android activations every day then..

      how many of those activations are actually a reinstall of the OS and not a new user?

      we'll never know.

      anyway, techies still dont get it. turnover = vanity, profit = sanity. Market share doesnt actaully really matter if you are making most of the money

  9. FartingHippo
    Paris Hilton

    A question on the subject of pixels

    Can anyone tell me why a MacBook display with 5 megapixels is called a retina display because the eye can't see the individual pixels BUT an A4 print from a 5mp camera looks shit?

    1. Onid
      Boffin

      Re: A question on the subject of pixels

      A few reasons one being gamut or in layman's terms the range of colours that can be represented by a 'pixel' on paper is far greater than a dot can represent on paper. The CMYK range has much smaller available colour space so even a 75 dpi image will look better when printing at 150 or even 300 dpi because the dots on the paper can be mixed to approximate the original colour better.

      Another reason - which might be even more important - are the 5 MPixels the camera real or just blur pixels (my term!!) if you zoom at 100% and you just see loads a noise - the 5 MP are just theoretical.. as megapixels have been hijacked by marketing departments and are now a useless metric on the quality of an image that a device can produce.

      1. FartingHippo
        Thumb Up

        Re: A question on the subject of pixels

        Huh. That mostly makes sense :)

        Cheers.

      2. Manny Bianco
        Go

        Re: A question on the subject of pixels

        Nice. I'd call them blurxels, though it sounds like the noise made when you accidentally vacuum up some cat vomit.

        1. Onid
          Thumb Up

          Re: A question on the subject of pixels

          nice term - yes we should adopt this for all cams in the consumer space ...100 MegaBlurxels = about 5 MP in the pro space!!! (as for sounding like cat vomit being sucked up in vacuum - that sums up what I feel about such photos hence quite apt!!)

          Can we have it added as an official elreg unit of measure?

      3. Onid
        Facepalm

        Re: A question on the subject of pixels

        argh crap - correction - range of colours that can be represented by a 'pixel' on screen is greater than paper ...

    2. ElReg!comments!Pierre

      Re: A question on the subject of pixels

      It depends a lot on the camera that took the picture, and on the quality of the printer. Assuming a good printer, let's focus on the camera. Cameras use 4 photosite per final pixel (1 red, 1 blue, 2 green). The colour image is then reconstructed using more or less complex algorythms. In order to cram more pixels on a sensor you need to reduce their size. The amount of noise a photosite generates is pretty muc constant, but the amount of light (useful signal) it gets drastically decreases with the size. That is made worst by the 4-to-1 ration of photosites per pixel because in most arrangements the proportion of lost space between photosites increases when the size of the photosite decreases. So, with megapickles a major sale argument, manufacturers began cramming more and more pixels on fixed-size sensors, which leads to a huge increase in the noise, and generally crappy images. The old 5D Mk 1, a pro camera of its time, had a 1Mp sensor. You can print that on an A4 page and it will look beautiful (assuming you have a very good printer).

      Then there is the issue of the lens: with megapickles _the_ major sale argument for consumer cameras, manufacturers started to not pay attention to other "detail" such as the glass you put in front of the sensor. That is actually more important for image quality than the sensor itself.

      Another point: images will no doubt look good on these "retina" display, but as soon as pickles density becomes a sale argument the market will be flooded with cheap multi-Mp monitors that will look like absolute shit because the (much more important) gamut, contrast, brightness etc will be complitely ignored. Then your average 5Mp display will look worst than the printout from the 5Mp camera you are talking about.

      1. ThomH

        Re: A question on the subject of pixels

        To add briefly to those that have commented above on why a camera's 5 megapixels usually don't look very good; the Bayer filter used by 99.99% of cameras has an extremely low entropy and hence introduces significant aliasing. Almost every camera with a Bayer filter therefore performs lowpass filtering as part of the demosaicing process (the main exception being Leica, Leica owners generally being aware of the issues and able to do what they think is intelligent in software after the fact).

        So cameras explicitly go out of their way to ensure the 5mp contains less information than it could, even if sensor size, quality of lens, etc, weren't problems.

  10. Joeykins
    Trollface

    $5bn to app developers

    So, if Apple take their 30% cut from the app store sales that equates to a tidy sum of approximately $2.143 billion just just for running the app store and not providing any other sales channel for the sale/installation of their apps.

    Nice work if you can get it.

    1. NogginTheNog

      Re: $5bn to app developers

      Yeah totally! But hey you have to hand it to them, I mean there was nothing stopping Nokia/Sony/Microsoft or anyone else from inventing (or perfecting?) that market/model before Apple did...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: $5bn to app developers

        Microsoft was prevented from doing it for Windows by the EU and US anti-monopoly people. Xbox has had some success with Xbox live etc.

  11. Gene Cash Silver badge
    WTF?

    80: Percentage of iOS-device users who have upgraded to iOS 5

    And 7+ months for Verizon/Motorola to upgrade my "Google Experience Device" Xoom to Ice Cream Sandwich. You do have to admit Apple does get some things right

  12. Raz
    FAIL

    1,700: New APIs in OS X Mountain Lion

    Did they add by mistake a couple of zeros? If not, I pity their devs.

    1. ThomH

      Re: 1,700: New APIs in OS X Mountain Lion

      They seem to conflate new methods with complete APIs — so if they had added, say, the method arrayByAddingObjectsFromArray:range: to the object NSArray (which they wouldn't, because it'd be redundant) then that counts as a new API.

    2. stanimir

      Re: 1,700: New APIs in OS X Mountain Lion

      just touching objective-c deserves pity

  13. CmdrX3

    You forgot...

    over 200 new features in ML and over 200 new features in IOS 6.

    ... and what seemed like over 200 pointless rounds of applause for some trivial feature announcements. Hopefully though IOS 6 will get Siri fixed to be more usable in the UK, and more usable in general.

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