As the Yosemite era draws to a close, speculation is mounting over what Apple has in store for its sequel. Although yet another Yosemite update — version 10.10.4 — is under construction, it’s high time to move on. This was not a terribly robust release.

With an App Store rating of just a tad better than two-and-a-half stars, Yosemite hasn’t quite received the love of its predecessors even though more than 60% of the Mac user base has upgraded so far. That will only increase before 10.11 arrives if only because of the continued high sales of new Macs preloaded with Yosemite.

First and foremost, it appears as if Apple maybe tried to do a little too much too quickly with Yosemite. The concept of Continuity and its related feature, Handoff, is a worthy enough scheme to allow the desktop and mobile systems to play well together. So you can read and respond to text messages received on your iPhone with either an iPad or a Mac. You can take phone calls, and, when it works, actually start work on one device in Mail, Pages and other supported apps, and continue where you left off on another Apple gadget.

Continue Reading…

If you’re curious about how many Apple Watches have shipped to customers, don’t expect any early satisfaction. Apple has put the numbers in a miscellaneous category on its financial statement, and there was no press release touting the launch week numbers. Just crickets. While Apple claims that orders exceeded supplies, that’s not an answer, since we don’t know how many were produced, and how many orders were actually placed.

Curiously, the question was never asked during the last quarterly conference call with financial analysts. A colleague suggests that Apple may have alerted the financial community that they would have no statement, but you sort of feel someone could have spoken up without losing their status as a participant. Besides, financial analysts aren’t reporters and will not necessarily ask probing questions during such sessions.

So we’re left with guesswork. The were early reports that maybe two or three million units were ordered. It’s also reported that Apple is managing to ship product ahead of the early promises, so maybe they are catching up with demand, whatever that demand might be.

Long term estimates of Apple Watch sales seem inconsistent or maybe not. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says demand is leveling off and expects 15 million to be sold by the end of the September quarter. But Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty has raised expected sales 20%, from 30 million to 36 million units during the first 12 months of availability. That would seem to be a vast difference except for the fact that she’s referring to a full year, not less than six months as Kuo suggests. It’s possible both figures are correct for the timeframes they specify, so they aren’t all that different after all.

Regardless, whether Apple sells 15 million in six months, or 36 million in the first year, the figures are far above what smartwatch makers have collectively managed since such products first came into being. So the expectations appear to be extremely high for a brand new product in a brand new category for Apple.

Remember that iPhone sales didn’t exceed 30 million until 2010 (39.99 million), its fiscal fourth year on sale. First fiscal year global sales were 1.39 million. In 2010, the year it was introduced, some 7.5 million iPads were sold; some 32.4 were sold in the second fiscal year. By those standards, the Apple Watch will be way ahead of the curve as a first-year product if projected sales are accurate.

But at a time when even selling over 50 million iPhones is no longer impressive, I can see where even realistic expectations about the success of the Apple Watch may seem disappointing in comparison, but they shouldn’t be.

Unfortunately, when the media covers Apple, perspective is often thrown out the window. I can understand the skepticism about wearables. It’s not as if people are truly clamoring for them, although there’s been a lot of talk about the Apple Watch. That you have to usually wait weeks to get one also creates the feeling you are buying something that’s in high demand, even though we have no idea how many Apple can actually built.

At least you should be able to buy the one you want at many Apple Stores in June, according to Apple’s current promise, and I have no doubt they’ll be fulfilled for at least some configurations. The real question is all about potential. How many people are willing to spend from $349 to $17,000 for a smartwatch, or any watch for that matter? While a watch may be suitable for fashion, isn’t it more about the looks than the features in many cases?

In recent weeks, I’ve had long talks with guests on The Tech Night Owl LIVE about the Apple Watch. There’s a healthy dose of skepticism, and the feeling on the part of some that they wouldn’t consider buying one if it wasn’t for their business. Sure, you can see legitimate uses for one. Those into fitness might appreciate its ability to record some of your health records and track your walking and jogging. Getting brief notifications of critical matters rather than being forced to pull out your smartphone and spend a far longer amount of your valuable time might also be an advantage.

One of our guests suggested women might be more inclined to want to buy one. The reason is that it’s a whole lot easier to check your wrist to manage a message, or even a phone call, than rummaging through a purse to retrieve a smartphone before the call goes to voicemail. I know that I frequently encounter problems getting ahold of my wife on her iPhone. The ring tone is muted in her purse, despite being turned up to full volume, and she often doesn’t get to it in time.

At least she calls back.

Now it may well be that ideal use case for an Apple Watch will be defined by the third party apps. It wasn’t clear what needs the iPad would serve either at first, and some feel it still doesn’t meet their needs. Regardless, I’m not about the suggest the best uses for Apple Watch. The market will tell us if its truly destined to be successful once the early adopter demand is satisfied.

When does a Retina display hit critical mass? Well, Apple and other smartphone makers have been selling mobile gear with Retina displays, meaning you can’t see the individual pixels at normal viewing distances, for several years. The price of your iPhone, or iPad, never changed. You just got more value for the same money.

To be fair, it does appear that you still pay a somewhat higher fee for the MacBook Pro with Retina display, though it may be no more than a $100 premium based on current pricing. But with the 27-inch 5K display on the iMac, you might believe the premium is fairly large, or you did until this week.

Now at $2,499, the former base high resolution iMac did offer, in addition to the marvelous 5K display, other enhancements over the regular iMac that included a faster processor, beefier graphics, and a 1TB Fusion Drive, the combo SSD/hard drive that offers close to the performance of a pure SSD. Subtracting the higher resolution display, it actually represented only a modest cost increase to get all those extra pixels.

Now Apple has essentially wiped out the difference. So a somewhat lower-end 27-inch Retina 5K iMac debuted this week for $1,999, same as the previous high-end model with the standard display. A notable change is the 3.3GHz Intel i5 processor, down from 3.4GHz on the previous standard resolution model, a very insignificant and slightly cheaper move. Apple also cut $200 from the price of the original 5K iMac. Together these moves essentially eliminate the price penalty, which makes this machine an even more impressive value.

Indeed, I gather than those who ordered the previous $1,999 iMac, and haven’t had it ship yet, are being upgraded to the new model. I suppose anyone who bought on of the older models in the past month has the right to complain as well. The iMac 5K is that much of an improvement that it’s worth trying to switch to one if you can.

Now to give you an example of just what this means, one of the lowest price third-party 5K displays is the HP Z27q, also a 27-inch model, which lists for $1,999 at the company’s site, although I’ve seen it advertised for $1,299 or even a little less. I have not seen direct comparisons yet, but if you want to regard HP’s entrant as equal to the iMac’s 5K display, that means the actual computer costs $799, which is pretty cheap.

In short, by normal standards, the iMac 5K is a pretty good deal, and that raises the question of how Apple plans to serve the needs of those seeking a high resolution display for a Mac Pro. Its potential value among content creators, most particularly video editors and 3D artists, is tremendous.

But Apple is still selling an aging 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display for $999. It addition to a panel that’s even older than the one on the regular 27-inch iMac, it’s saddled with USB 2.0 and the original Thunderbolt port. It represents a poor value, and I wonder why Apple continues to sell it.

If Apple were to switch to 5K, and update to USB 3.0, Thunderbolt 2, and the newer MagSafe connector, I suppose it could be priced at $1,299, same as the HP counterpart. So where is it?

I suppose one might indeed be in the works for release soon. Maybe Apple was waiting for prices of 5K panels to come down, and to be available in sufficient quantities to allow for mass production of a dedicated display, perhaps one that more closely resembles current iMac designs, with their super thin edges.

Now with Mac sales climbing, still, this year’s Mac refreshes make plenty of sense. Installing Force Touch trackpads to the MacBook and MacBook Pro with Retina display is brilliant. It takes the venerable input device to a new level of flexibility. I can see why it’s still absent on the MacBook Air, where prices are kept at a minimum, though perhaps it’ll show up next year. Sure, the upgraded hardware isn’t much faster, and battery life may or may not be somewhat longer depending on the model. But Apple has made Macs a better value than ever, and the price reduction of the iMac 5K, and the new entry-level version, is really going to appeal to content creators who don’t need a Mac Pro, or can’t afford one.

When Apple cut the price of the MacBook Air by $100 last year, in lieu of altering performance much because of the lack of new Intel parts, sales appear to have increased. The 2014 Mac mini is also $100 less the than previous model, although you can’t get the quad-core CPU or upgrade the memory anymore. The sole Mac that probably needs an upgrade right now is the Mac Pro, perhaps to provide up-to-date graphics and maybe a somewhat lower upgrade price for the larger SSDs. Perhaps that’ll happen at the WWDC, although the main expectations are more about new versions of iOS, OS X, and perhaps Apple TV.

From the day Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography, “Jobs” was published, there were heightened expectations that Apple planned to build a TV set. It all came in response to the quote from Jobs that he had cracked the secret for the best TV interface ever. Since there was already an Apple TV set-top box for streaming content to your set, this must surely mean Apple planned to go all the way. Well, perhaps.

So rumors arose about the expected features of such a set, emphasizing such capabilities as Siri integration. Even then, you would have expected to use the remote to state your wishes, since just shouting “Hey Siri” in a large room with other family members present, and possibly competing for attention, wouldn’t be terribly efficient.

As usual when expectations of a new Apple product category arise, other companies attempted to react. So at one CES, Lenovo, the PC maker, announced their own smart TV set, apparently to sell in China at first. After the initial announcements, news about the product seems to have vanished.

Even amid reports of when Apple’s TV set would appear, there were other reports that it had been delayed, and delayed yet again.

As you might have noticed, there’s very little talk about an Apple smart TV nowadays. According to published reports, Apple experimented with one, but ultimately gave it up a year ago. One key reason is that they couldn’t make a substantial difference or a dent in a very crowded market. So I suppose it’s best to let VIZIO, Samsung and all the rest continue to slug it out with 4K and lower prices.

Now it’s fair to say that the latest reports about discontinuing development of a TV might just be ways to avoid admitting they just got it all wrong. Since there’s no Apple TV set, it’s Apple’s fault for giving up on the idea. It’s not possible that the rumors were wrong, or that a TV set may have been one of many products Apple evaluates but never produces. Indeed, one of the most prominent industry analysts, Gene Munster, of Piper Jaffray, has been touting the prospects for such a product for years, and only now has given up on such speculation.

So we’re back to the souped up Apple TV set-top box. The price of the current model, three years old, has been reduced to $69. That may be a good way to boost sales, particularly since the major competition, Roku, has already refreshed its models. In any case, the latest rumors have it that Apple is poised to launch the next generation Apple TV at the WWDC in June. Reason is that there will be an SDK for developers and perhaps the announcement of an Apple subscription TV service.

With a new Apple TV, there’s lots to talk about. Will it keep the current form factor, or appear in a different form? What about the features? Will there be support for 4K video, sometimes called Ultra HD? Some of the rumors suggest that the answer is no because of the low level of market penetration for the new high definition TV standard. But with decent sets now available for less than $1,000, and Ultra HD Blu-ray waiting in the wings, it would seem the format is due for a major takeoff this year, particularly around the holiday season.

Besides, it’s not that Apple is avoiding 4K. You can already output to a 4K display on some of the new MacBooks, and don’t forget the iMac with 5K Retina display that just got a decent price reduction this week. So it would make plenty of sense to add 4K as a tentpole feature of the new Apple TV. That would be the most obvious and compelling improvement, the one that will actually be noticeable to some users actually streaming content from the services that do offer 4K (at least with a limited number of selections), such as Amazon Instant Video and Netflix.

Other expected features include Siri support (but consider the conditions I posed above), support for third-party apps and perhaps gaming. Hardware is expected to be based on Apple’s A8 chip, but since an A9 is expected to power the next generation iPhone, why not go the whole hog? There may also be more storage to accommodate 4K streaming.

When it comes to an Apple subscription TV service, I have to wonder what difference Apple can make over existing alternatives. After all, there’s already Dish Network’s Sling TV and PlayStation Vue. Both provide subsets of the channels that are offered on cable and satellite services. Fewer channels means a lower price, but how does that differ from just ordering up basic cable or satellite? Quite often you can get an introductory package of either for not much more than the cheap streaming package, with far more to offer, not to mention broadcast television. Other than the emotional tie of getting rid of cable, the difference is difficult to define.

In any case, with no more talk of an Apple TV set, I do look forward to the next Apple TV set-top box, but would like to see how, aside perhaps from 4K, Apple will make overhaul the industry. Is some interface wizardry also involved, echoing what Steve Jobs said in that biography? Or was he just thinking out loud to spook the competition?