All Things Digital

Intel’s Core 2 Duo Extreme X9100 is shipping in “limited quantities,” all right. Quantities limited to Apple.

The Apple (AAPL) Web site went offline for a bit this morning, and when it returned it featured a handful of new iMacs, all of them apparently running Intel’s (INTC) as-of-yet unannounced X9100 Montevina processor. Priced between $1,199 and $2,199, the latest iteration of Apple’s iconic all-in-one system features the same enclosure as its predecessors, outfitted with the most powerful graphics cards yet available on the system and Core 2 Duos running at 2.4GHz, 2.66GHz, 2.8GHz and 3.06 GHz. All four have 1066MHz front-side buses and 6MB of L2 cache, configurations curiously absent from Intel’s current price list but expected to debut with Intel’s Montevina refresh.

How is it that Apple’s able to ship machines running unannounced Intel product? Perhaps the company’s designed its product roadmap to dovetail perfectly with Intel’s. Or, perhaps, Apple’s agreement with Intel is another of CEO Steve Jobs’s sweetheart-of-a-deal masterpieces that gives the company early access to Intel’s newest chips.

“I feel like a $200 whore.”

That was one iPhone early adopter’s crass assessment of his feelings of self-worth, after Apple unexpectedly cut the price of the device by a third–just two months after it arrived at market. At an unveiling of a new line of iPod music and video players in San Francisco yesterday, CEO Steve Jobs said Apple was dropping the price of its 8-gigabyte iPhone from $599 to $399 to drive sales of the device over the crucial holiday selling period. “The customer-satisfaction numbers for the iPhone are off the charts,” Jobs said. “The customer-sat[isfaction] numbers are higher for the iPhone than for any Apple product ever. They love it. But we want to make the iPhone even more affordable for even more people this holiday season. So we’re going to do something about that today. We’re not going to sell it for $599 anymore.”

Now price cuts for cellphones aren’t unusual. Samsung’s Blackjack and Motorola’s Razr both saw rapid price cuts following their respective debuts. But neither was launched into a market of monomanaical loyalists willing to camp out on a sidewalk overnight just to be among the first to own one–many of whom are today feeling a bit used. “Over time I have owned a 3G iPod, original Shuffle, iBook G4, iMac, new Shuffle, 4G iPod, video iPod, iPod mini and now the iPhone,” one wrote in a post to everythingiPhone. “I can see updates to the product line being made over time, but $200 in two months is a kick in the nads to EVERYONE who bought an iPhone.”

Perhaps, especially if the cut was made possible not by a sudden drop in component prices but a calculated overpricing conceived to exploit early-adopter demand. But ultimately, those who don’t think the iPhone was worth $599 when it debuted probably shouldn’t have bought it. “That’s technology,” Jobs told USA Today. “If they bought it this morning, they should go back to where they bought it and talk to them. If they bought it a month ago, well, that’s what happens in technology.”

One last point worth noting here: Early adopters probably aren’t the only folks to be taken aback by the sudden and precipitous drop in the iPhone’s price. Apple’s rivals in the handset market must be absolutely reeling. Here they were scrambling to produce iPhone-like, and iPhone-lite devices they believed would compete with a $600 phone they could easily underprice. Now, they’ve got to compete with a $399 device that is perhaps one of the best examples of Apple’s design and engineering prowess. And they’ve got to do it in time for the holiday shopping season …

Given the recent monomania over Apple’s iPhone, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the company also has a thriving personal-computer business that’s tearing market share from the hands of rival computer-makers.

But while Apple may have taken the “computer” out of its name, it definitely hasn’t taken the computer out of the company. According to market researcher IDC, sales of Apple machines rose to 1.76 million units during its third quarter of the year, up 33% from the same period a year ago.

And they’re sure to rise in the fourth quarter as well, thanks to a batch of new products the company debuted today. At an event at its corporate headquarters, Apple uncrated a sleek new aluminum-and-glass iMac desktop (with all-new Bluetooth 2.0 keyboard) and a faster Mac mini as well as significant upgrades to its iLife (revamped iMovie) and iWork (new spreadsheet program) software suites and .Mac service (10 GB of storage plus new photo-sharing features).

Interestingly, Apple’s selling its new iMacs at prices lower than those of their predecessors, and while those prices are still higher than those of low-end Windows PCs, the company says they compare favorably to more high-quality PCs. “Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at Apple’s event today. “We want to do that at the lowest prices we can. But there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship. And we just can’t do it. We can’t ship junk. There are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are. And we think that there’s a very significant slice of the [market] that wants that, too. You’ll find that our products are not premium priced. You price out our competitors’ products, and add features that actually make them useful, and they’re the same or actually more expensive. We don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products.”

Fire up the rumor mill. Apple’s .Mac service, which allows subscribers access to email, data storage and Web publishing tools for $99 a year, will go offline for maintenance tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. PDT–hours that coincide quite nicely with those of the press event at which Apple is rumored to be launching its radically redesigned iMacs. Could it be that the archaic online services suite will see a major upgrade as well? Perhaps even the one based on Google’s Web apps that Apple CEO Steve Jobs seemed to hint at during this year’s D conference?

I’ll give you a concrete example. I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they’d done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, since we’re pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It’s way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they’d put on phones before.

“And, you know, that client is the result of a lot of technology on the client, that client application. So when we show it to them, they’re just blown away by how good it is. And you can’t do that stuff in a browser.

“So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get a persistent state of things when you’re disconnected from a browser, how do you actually run apps locally using, you know, apps written in those technologies so they can be pretty transparent, whether you’re connected or not.

“But it’s happening fairly slowly and there’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment. At the same time, the hardware is progressing to where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower-cost devices, on lower and lower-power devices. And so there’s some pretty cool things you can do with clients.”