Apple CFO Gives Info on Company Direction

osViews.com writes "Mac World is reporting a recent talk given by Apple's Chief Financial Officer (Peter Oppenheimer) at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium. The article illustrates several things about about Apple's business plan, much of which is totally new information about the company's current and future direction. Here's the nutshell summary: iPod "Halo" effect is causing some Windows switchers, little demand for satellite radio/iPod integration, iPod shuffle margins below HD ipods, happy with rate of growth - no plans to license OS X, margins on Mac mini equal to eMac (both below corporate average), retail store to expand to 125, no plans for media center PC - prefers to stream multimedia to TV from primary computer over wireless network, no video for iPod, portable media centers a failure."

Re:great submission!

[tehshen]

I wish we had more stories done exactly like this one.

It'll be posted again within the next week or so, don't worry.

I just don't get this

[Anonymous Coward]

Halo wasn't even that good, but it's being given now not only credit for the success of the XBox but the success of the iPod??

Something is seriously wrong with us as consumers if we are so reordering our world for such a mediocre FPS.

Re:Um, so what?

[Elranzer]

I mean front page? Come on. Anyone who trades tech stocks knows that companies are constantly participating in various financial conferences where these sorts of presentations are given.

True. Frontpage [microsoft.com] sucks so bad the Microsoft even dropped it from the standard Office suite. I think they replaced it with Publisher.

You know a product sucks really bad when it loses market share to Notepad.exe

Games running "on" the Mac mini

[tepples]

There's a large chunk of the vocal PC userbase who use the thing as glorified nintendo- it's really (imo) the ONLY area where the PC has any kind of advantage over the Mac.

The Mac mini is just the right size to fit a GameCube on top of it [mac.com]. The only thing keeping Macs from having a lot of games running "on" it :) is that very few consumer 17" monitors can display both Mac mini's 768p DVI/VGA output and the GameCube's 480i S-video output (the component cable is nearly unavailable, and newer Cubes don't even have the jack for it).

Re:Sounds like Apple is planning Airport Express 2

[toothless_kinch]

Combine this with the HD capabilities in Tiger and you end up with a pretty nice setup for not a lot of dough. But will 54 MB/s be enough to stream TV shows and movies without pausing and skipping? Hmm, why has Apple been doing so much work on low-bandwidth video protocols?

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the next version of OS X will be codenamed LYGER.

http://returnself.com/blog/

Re:Sounds like Apple is planning Airport Express 2

[Ohreally_factor]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the next version of OS X will be codenamed LYGER.

That would be sweet.

Re:So, Mac's dying?

[porcupine8]

That stubborn and insanely stubborn backward mentality is what's finally going to sink Apple.

Absolutely. The first 20 years of their existence, the only thing that kept them afloat was licensing their OS to other manufacturers. This new no-licensing policy is really a death knell, there's no way they can stay in business like that.

Re:Bring back the abacus

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing the modern world could do to get me back is announce support for the abacus. Until then, I will stick with my abacus on be more productive than doing the same thing on that newfangled computer with bad support for beads. For my personal work I switched to a TI-32 Plus - it's faster (by a wide margin) at the tasks I do daily, but still not as nice as my abacus.

The abacus was killed prematurely.

Re:Proudly dying for 20 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting how times have changed [digiserve.com]...