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It's been a busy week for Apple-focused bloggers -- three major items fell from the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) tree. Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.2 Monday, and then on Tuesday it delivered both its Apple TV Take Two software update and its professional-grade Aperture photo editing and management solution.
Plus, iPhone buzz is alive and well -- AT&T (NYSE: T) set up camp in Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX), and analyst estimates of bootleg "unlocked" iPhones crept up on 1.5 million.
Wahoo, It's 10.5.2!
Mac OS X 10.5.2 is the second update Apple has delivered for its new Leopard operating system, and Sven Rafferty, who types out SvenOnTech, seemed pleased to see it. "Also noted by Apple is, 'Improved general stability when running third-party applications.' That would be nice since 10.5.1 seems to crash so many of my applications when I was on that awful rev," he wrote.
The MacRumors.com thread about the 10.5.2 announcement picked up a lot of traction, garnering more than 1,100 reader comments.
"Awesome -- now a new set of problems for people to complain about," noted ZacUSNYR. "I'm installing once I get home!"
So far, most early adopters of 10.5.2 seem to be pleased, though the upgrade did sometimes give rise to a variety of issues. MacRumors.com has been posting verified and unverified fixes and "possible" issues in a new wiki: "As an experimental feature, we've created a guide wiki page for people to document known problems fixed as well as ongoing bugs. Any member with 5 posts or more can edit this wiki," the page notes.
Second Looks for Apple TV Take Two
Most bloggers seemed pleased to see the Apple TV update, which brings a new navigation system and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to rent movies directly from the Apple TV. Some, though, experienced an upgrade process they weren't expecting.
Bob Rudis explained his experience on The Apple Blog, "I started the download before my evening run and it was ready to install when I finally had time to complete the upgrade. What followed was a series of very un-Apple events. From the point I told it to start the process to being greeted with the new main menu I received practically no useful feedback apart from the pretty silver-grey Apple logo and a progress bar. I experienced waiting through at least three reboots, had 'static' appear (briefly) and was finally placed into a completely foreign menu system. Apple provided no verbiage on what was going on nor whether each step was truly successful."
For others, however, the upgrade went fine. RClay responded, "My upgrade was smooth. No hiccups that I noticed, but, then again, I switched my TV to another input until I saw the light stop blinking. I also watched the Wall-E trailer, It took about 10 seconds to load and ran without a hitch, and I have a G network."
Second Take = New Sales?
Outside of the Apple enthusiast world, is the next-generation Apple TV worth a buy?
"The new version of Apple TV makes the device somewhat more appealing to the small group of people who already do a lot of video on iTunes. It's not a large group, and at this price, most of them could just as easily turn to their cable video on demand system to watch movies," James McQuivey, a vice president of research and analyst for Forrester, told MacNewsWorld.
"Altogether, with the price drop and the ability to do rentals, I see a 10 percent spike in sales this year, but not more than that. To really become the center of someone's digital home, the device has to have significantly more storage and has to somehow figure out how to bring free TV content in -- whether streamed from the Internet or captured from the TV like a DVR," he added.
About 1.5 Million Unlocked iPhones!?
Ever since Apple and AT&T reported different iPhone figures, various analysts have been trying to account for the differences in the number of sales Apple reported vs. the number of activations AT&T reported. Thousands were in the sales pipeline, no doubt, but where were the others? Early estimates hit 600,000 quickly, then inched up to 1 million. Now the number of unlocked iPhones is estimated to be 1.5 million, which is more than 25 percent of all iPhones sold.
AppleInsider keyed off a post covering an American Technology Research report by analyst Shaw Wu, who reportedly believes the iPhone is in use in three dozen countries around the world. Interestingly enough, it's not too hard to find online posts from people purporting to be using iPhones in other countries.
"It doesn't seem too unlikely to have 1.5 million hacked iphones out there. I live in Taiwan and i bought a new phone last month. they were selling the iPhone at the store i went to and i live in a small city. since Taiwan doesn't have an official carrier for the iPhone. it must be a hacked one. probably bought in the US and sent here," noted harmonix23 on the AppleInsider post. "And there are probably thousands of stores all over the world selling them. I heard you can buy iPhones in Canada with no official carrier too."
Of course, consumers using unlocked iPhones miss out on carrier integration features like the amazing Visual Voicemail feature offered through AT&T. Still, it seems worldwide users will get by without everything.
"There's no doubt that the iPhone is hot," David Chamberlain, a principal analyst for In-Stat, told MacNewsWorld. "Folks I met with in Japan were absolutely hyperventilating to get them."
What about the risk of an unlocked iPhone not working at all?
"In many of the markets where the unlocked iPhones are available, many people are accustomed to sometimes shoddy knockoffs, pirated goods and products that don't have a full factory warranty. Risk getting bricked? They're probably not likely to visit the iTunes store for an update, so they're probably relatively immune to that," Chamberlain explained.
Moving forward, iPhone lust may become an issue for Apple if the company was hoping that everyone would play by the rules, which seems at least somewhat unlikely.
"I think the real problem is going to be obtaining many more agreements like the ones they negotiated in the U.S., UK and Germany," Chamberlain said. "Japan might still be a possibility, and perhaps Korea, but after that, they're probably going to have to settle for being just like Palm, who made both cell phone and non-cell phone versions of their products."
AT&T and Starbucks
In other hot news, AT&T said it would start delivering WiFi service to more than 7,000 Starbucks coffeehouses in the U.S. Starbucks already has free iTunes WiFi access for iPhone and iPod touch users. While AT&T-using iPhone customers in the U.S. might rejoice, for T-Mobile fans the news isn't so great -- most outlets are reporting that T-Mobile simply lost its Starbucks account.
In any event, the next two weeks should be wild as well. Best blogosphere guesses include updated MacBook Pros and Time Capsule, with some rumor blogs looking for a special Apple media event in the last week of February -- which will likely usher in the much-anticipated iPhone software developer kit.
