When Apple uncrates a Mac Pro that delivers “up to twice the performance of its predecessor” the week before Macworld, you know the company must be planning to roll out something damn impressive during CEO Steve Jobs’s keynote address next week.
This morning Apple announced upgrades to its Mac Pro desktops and Xserve servers. Powering the new machines: one or two of the new quad-core 45 nanometer Penryn-family processors Intel announced at CES yesterday. “The new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac we’ve ever made,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of product marketing. Interestingly, the company’s new Xserve is, according to the press release, Apple’s “most powerful server ever.”
Odd that Apple would announce some of its fastest and most powerful machines the week before Macworld San Francisco. Perhaps Jobs wanted to steal a little bit of buzz from CES, as he did last year with the announcement of the iPhone. In any event, the debut of these new products would seem to make it more likely that Apple will indeed announce updated MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops next week.
Who’s programming Microsoft’s on-hold music, Apple’s Phil Schiller? Waiting for the company’s third-quarter earnings call to begin yesterday, those listening in were treated to an instrumental piano version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” From “Titanic,” the disaster movie. Seriously. It’s almost as if Schiller plugged his iPod into Microsoft’s conference-call system.
Anyway … Turns out Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was wrong when he said back in February that Wall Street’s expectations for its new Vista operating system were too high. Microsoft said late Thursday that its fiscal third-quarter profit surged 65%, handily beating analyst estimates, thanks to good sales of Vista. Redmond posted earnings of $4.93 billion, or 50 cents a share, for the quarter on revenue of $14.4 billion. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial had expected only 46 cents a share on revenue of $13.89 billion. Now, admittedly a fair chunk of third-quarter revenue was deferred from Microsoft’s last quarter. Without it, revenue growth would have been $1.67 billion less, which is in line with past performance. Still a good showing, about which Microsoft officials are upbeat. “I am extremely pleased that we delivered a quarter of strong double-digit growth,” said Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell. “And I am looking forward to a very good finish to this fiscal year with strength continuing into fiscal 2008.” Naturally.
