Tony Bradley:

Apple’s Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, recently pointed out that Apple receives more than 10,000 new app submissions each week. Yes, every seven days Apple receives a volume of new apps equivalent to the Android Market. Schiller cited this statistic to explain how Apple is somewhat a victim of its own success and that with so many submissions sometimes apps fall through the cracks.

According to Mobclix.com, more than 100 million apps are downloaded from the Apple app store each month. Doing the math based on the number of iPhones users, that means that iPhone users download an average of 11 apps per month.

As with all averages that means there are iPhone users who don’t download any apps in a given month, and some other iPhone user downloading 22 apps to make up the difference. As with all statistics, the impressively overwhelming amount of app downloads have to be taken with a grain of salt.

I’d venture to say that most of those 100,000 iPhone apps are pretty crappy with very few downloads. The Simplenotes and Tweeties of the App Store are few and far between.

Ted Landau of the Mac Observer wrote a piece yesterday titled Mac Pro: R.I.P. in which he said:

Given these numbers [the benchmarks for the new i7 iMacs], why bother with a Mac Pro? Personally, I can only think of one and half reasons — neither of which will drive a large number of sales. The one reason is internal expandability. If you want three internal hard drives and two internal optical drives and an upgraded graphics card, you need a Mac Pro. The half reason is the display. The iMac has a great display. But if you want more flexibility, including the option to replace your initial display without having to get a new computer, you may prefer a Mac Pro.

For at least the next several years, I expect the market for the Mac Pro to remain. There will always be some people for whom the Mac Pro is the best fit. But their numbers will continue to decline. As with the old minicomputers that desktop computers replaced, all brands of large desktop computers (not just the Mac Pro) are destined to be phased out over time.

Obviously, anything like this will garner responses from the Macintosh-loving community. Today, Landau clarified his argument:

My first point was that the Mac Pro, as it exists today, is approaching the end of its life (which I’ll define as within the next 6 years). I did not conclude this simply because the current iMac is faster than the Mac Pro. Nor did I mean to imply that the iMac, as it exists today, can meet all the needs of people who currently use a Mac Pro.

What I did mean is that the current trend in computing is towards devices that can do more and more in less and less space. The technology is permitting this and the customers want it. Internal components keep shrinking; some components may become obsolete (optical drives?); there will be greater emphasis on accessing resources over a network. In the future, there may still be a Pro model that exceeds the specs of a lower-priced consumer model, but I expect it will be much smaller than the Pro is today. The days where a company will have a row of desktop behemoths, one on every desk, are numbered. That was the position I was taking and I continue to stand by it.

A second main point of the article was that the Mac Pro market might shrink to the point that it no longer makes sense for Apple to stay in it. While I still view this as a possibility, especially in the larger context of Apple’s overall shift towards consumer electronics, I admit to have overstated the case. Even though I know a few graphic/video artists who find a McBook Pro to be sufficient for their needs, I know that this is far from universally the case. There will always be a demand from professionals for machines that push the envelope of what a computer can do. And as long as Apple can continue to make a profit from catering to this audience, no matter how small the market is, there is no reason for Apple to stop.

Even with this clarification, I think Landau’s mantra of “The Mac Pro is Dead” is wrong.

Yes, the i7 iMac is stunning — in every way. Yes, the unibody MacBook Pros are great machines and far more powerful than the notebooks before them. I think very few — if any — Apple-watchers would disagree with the argument that Apple is shipping the best Macs ever.

But I think Landau underestimates the need for expandability and the desire of professionals to choose their own display. As great as the iMac is, it doesn’t give users options. And professional users want options. They need to add more video cards, RAID cards, more storage and RAM. And not everyone wants a sheet of glass between them and their work.

There’s also a perception at play here. Most professionals look at an iMac and see a machine they’d buy to use at home as a family computer. Until Apple starts marketing the iMac as a professional machine, the public won’t see it as such. And I’m not sure Apple wants their customers to see the iMac as a music-editing, video-rendering, number-crunching, code-compiling, expandable workstation. Even with the i7 iMacs, Apple’s advertising is all about the display, not about the power behind it.

My guess is that Apple will widen the performance gap between the iMac and Mac Pro before long, and things will get back to normal. My guess is that we’ll know within Landau’s 6 year timeframe.

Holy crap, this is awesome.

Reminds me of this.

Engadget:

Apple’s new Core i7-based iMac might be a performance monster, but it looks like the whole family’s having some problems getting out of the gate: in addition to the previously-noted performance issues with the Core 2 Duo models, a quick glance across Apple’s support forums and on other Mac boards around the web reveals that some machines are showing up DOA and / or with cracked screens. We’re a little more familiar with the DOA issue, since the new i7 we just bought doesn’t boot at all, but the cracked screen issue seems to be equally common and mostly affecting the bottom left corner, from what we can tell. Now, our review Core 2 Duo 27-inch iMac is perfectly fine, and Chris Ziegler’s new Core i7 machine doesn’t have any problems either, so these obviously aren’t universal issues, but if you’re about to stick one of these under the tree for someone it might be wise to do some surreptitious testing first.