All Things Digital

The malaise in the financial markets may have taken its toll on Apple’s share price, but it has done little to hamper sales of the company’s hardware. Despite a down market, Apple’s (AAPL) share of the laptop sector is increasing. In the United States Apple’s share grew by 60 percent, year over year, rising from 6.6 percent to 10.6 percent in the second quarter of this year. In contrast, most every other PC maker’s market share was either down, flat or very slightly up compared with last year.

Clearly, Apple’s position in the notebook computer market is a strong one. And presumably the company will grow stronger still following the debut of its new MacBooks, which are rumored to be launching in mid-October. Perhaps RBC analyst Mike Abramsky wasn’t all that far off when he predicted that 2008 could be a record-breaking year for Apple. Back in August, Abramsky suggested that “massive back-to-school Mac sales” in excess of three million will see Apple reporting year-over-year growth of 44 percent for the three-month period ending September.

Up to now, Apple shipped 2,319,000 Macs in Q1 2008 and 2,289,000 in Q2. If it ships the 3.04 million Abramsky predicts for Q3 and a similar number in Q4, 2008, well … 2008 is going to be a very good year for Apple. Very good.

Economic softness in the states is widespread, but apparently it stops short at 1 Infinite Loop. Though consumer spending on electronics is generally trending lower, it’s trending higher for Apple products. According to a new survey by Changewave, eight percent of consumers plan to buy a laptop in the next 90 days, and five percent, a desktop. Of these, 34 percent are considering a MacBook and 30 percent an Apple (AAPL) desktop–up two percent and three percent respectively from the year prior.

This as consumer interest in machines from PC rivals like Dell (DELL) and HP (HPQ) wanes. Planned purchases of Dell laptops have fallen 4 to 20 percent while planned purchases of HP desktops have fallen 3 to 17 percent. “Consumer electronics spending will remain weak over the next 90 days,” said Changewave Executive Director Paul Carton. “The one bright spot is Apple, whose Mac sales are outperforming and are poised to once again reach new all-time highs.”

Odd to hear when Apple products are typically more spendy than those of the company’s rivals. Apple Financial Services must be doing great business these days.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd seems to have managed to cut the fat from the company without hitting any of its internal organs. HP reported a 10 percent increase in third-quarter earnings Tuesday, while profits rose 14 percent to $2 billion. Net revenues at HP (HPQ) were $28 billion, up 10 percent from the same period last year, and earnings per share were 80 cents, which beat analysts’ expectations and the company’s own projections.

Strong results, but sadly ones that don’t suggest much of a change in America’s economic troubles. Nearly two-thirds, or 68 percent, of HP’s revenue came from outside the U.S.

Overseas travel to the United States has plummeted in the past five years, and it may well plummet further thanks to The Department of Homeland Security’s recently revealed border policy on laptops, iPods and other electronics carried into the country by travelers. The policy (PDF) is five pages long, but essentially boils down to this: DHS agents can routinely seize travelers’ electronic gear and keep it for as long as they see fit. And they can search its contents and copy and share them with other agencies. And they can do this “absent individualized suspicion.”

The policy–which covers “any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form” as well as “written materials commonly referred to as ‘pocket trash’ or ‘pocket litter’”–applies to anyone entering this country, including U.S. citizens.

Anyone who wants to, that is.

If only we could keep our right to privacy safely up in “the cloud: along with our data …

If you’re considering buying a new MacBook/Pro or iPod, you might want to postpone that call to Apple Financial Services for a few months. Otherwise, you may end up with a very quickly outdated laptop and media player. In a bulletin to retail partners today, Apple warned of declining iPod and MacBook/Pro inventory and “strongly suggested” they stock up on the devices before the back-to-school rush. What this means, of course, is that the company is very likely nearing refreshes of both those product lines.

And it’s about time, isn’t it? The iPod would certainly benefit from a storage and feature update. The MacBook is due for a six-month refresh. And Apple’s (AAPL) MacBook Pro is due for a revision, since design-wise it’s really just a tweaked version of the machine that debuted as the PowerBook Titanium in 2001.

Anyone want to buy a used MacBook Pro? In September?

So apparently Dell’s (DELL) laptops are “the world’s most secure” in the same way that SNL’s Tommy Flanagan is the world’s most eligible bachelor.

The National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, which monitors truth in advertising, didn’t find enough of it in Dell’s claim that it makes the “World’s Most Secure Commercial Laptops.” Tipped off to Dell’s “world’s most secure” advertising campaign by rival Lenovo (LNVGY), NAD examined Dell’s claims and determined it to have a few too many unnecessary superlatives.

NAD noted that while the PC maker’s machines were indeed secure, “claims suggesting Dell notebook computers are the ‘world’s most secure’ were not supported by the evidence in the record.”

The world’s most secure laptops … Yeah.. that’s the ticket! Yeah, you betcha …

Acer Awarded 3rd Place in Westminster PC Show

Acer leapfrogged over Lenovo to officially claim the No. 3 position in the desktop PC market this morning when the European Commission approved its acquisition of Dutch computer maker Packard Bell. In a statement, the EC said the deal “would not significantly impede effective competition. “The commission’s examination showed that the proposed merger would entail horizontal overlaps for desktops and laptops, both for professionals and consumers,” it said. “However, the market would remain competitive post-merger in all segments of the PC sector, with established alternative suppliers such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, Toshiba, Sony and Lenovo.”

Popular Mechanics is frantically turning the crank on the Apple rumor mill, isn’t it? In the annual guessing-game leading up to the Macworld Expo, the publication speculates that CEO Steve Jobs will announce a breakthrough laptop-tablet device at this year’s keynote, one quite a bit different from the gigantism-afflicted iPhone tablets imagined by others.

” … Any Apple tablet would have to be, first and foremost, a laptop–not an über-iPhone,” writes Popular Mechanics’ Glenn Derene. “… [It should] have a full keyboard, and since the keyboard generally dictates the size of the screen, I’d propose a 13-in. widescreen. … It could, and should, be 2.5 pounds or less. To achieve that, the tablet should offload heavy components such as the optical drive, making do with, say, a 32 GB solid-state drive rather than a hard-disk drive. … That would let it run a full Leopard OS while delivering long battery life. … [And it] should ship with a desktop dock. … Much more than a simple port replicator, this dock would house a DVD burner (maybe even an HD-DVD/Blu-ray combo drive) and a 500 GB 2.5-in. hard-disk drive that could automatically sync with and back up the SSD onboard the MacBook Plus. The dock would bump up performance with a graphics card that could take over from the MacBook Plus’s motherboard GPU, plus some extra RAM and instructions to the CPU to kick up its clock speed.”

An imaginative little bit of fantasy, this, and one that makes for great reading. That said, if the Apple Industrial Design Group were ever to propose a device like the one pictured above to CEO Steve Jobs, he’d probably hurl them one-by-one from the roof of Apple HQ.

OLPC is proving as apt an acronym for “One Lawsuit Per Child” as it is for “One Laptop Per Child.” Lagos Analysis Corp., the Nigerian company that claims the nonprofit stole its design for a multilingual keyboard, has put a dollar amount on the damages in its patent-infringement suit against OLPC, and it’s a jaw-dropper: $20 million.

That’s quite a sum to demand for the alleged infringement of a design patent–especially one for which there is evidently a fair bit of prior art.

But that doesn’t seem to phase faze Lagos Analysis much. “This patent infringement lawsuit is another step in LANCOR’s continued protection of its intellectual property,” said the company’s founder, Ade Oyegbola (who, it should be noted, was convicted of bank fraud in Boston in 1990). “LANCOR will continue to take aggressive steps to protect its intellectual property around the world.” Adding “ALL MY BANK ACCOUNTS IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD HAVE BEEN FROZEN AND I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE IN THEIR DISLODGEMENT, FOR WHICH YOU ARE ENTITLED TO 35% OF THE SUM OF $45.4 MILLION …”

It’s still 10 to 12 years away from market, but when it arrives IBM’s new silicon photonics technology could transform even the lowliest Dell laptop into a portable Blue Gene.

The so-called Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator transmits data between between multiple cores on a chip using pulses of light through silicon, instead of electrical signals on wires. It’s 100 to 1,000 times smaller than previously demonstrated modulators, and it transmits data 100 times faster than traditional copper wires while using 10 times less power.

If IBM’s able to replicate it commercially–and the company insists it can–it could inspire a vast array of new highly portable supercomputers that expend as little energy as a lightbulb. “Just like fiber-optic networks have enabled the rapid expansion of the Internet by enabling users to exchange huge amounts of data from anywhere in the world, IBM’s technology is bringing similar capabilities to the computer chip,” Will Green, IBM’s lead scientist on the project, told Reuters. “You immediately can envision the mobile applications that that would allow you to do. Remote laboratory instruments for medical applications, screening for diseases or even complicated DNA analysis.”