Trefis highlights the three factors that make the iPad more valuable for Apple than Mac desktops:

1. Pricing gap between iPads and Mac desktops expected to narrow over time
2. Unit sales of iPads will exceed Mac desktops sold (We expect Apple to sell 4 million iPads in 2010 compared to 3.8 million Mac desktops.)
3. Gross margins for Mac desktops are lower than iPad margins

Full article here.

“More specifically, prototypes of a new Mac mini — Apple’s smallest and most affordable system, commonly employed by tech savvy Mac users as an ad-hoc living room media server, has been making the rounds with an HDMI port in place of its legacy DVI connector, according to two people familiar with the matter,” Jade and McLean report. “Only Apple TV [currently] provides an HDMI connector capable of delivering both audio and video signals to an HDMI display.”

Jade and McLean report, “However, another product floating around Apple’s labs is a proprietary mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter that the Mac maker had originally developed and intended to ship alongside its most recent iMac revision, according to people with knowledge of the situation. It’s said to include technology that would allows Macs shipping with an updated mini DisplayPort spec to channel both video and audio through the mini Display port to the HDMI adapter, rather than just video.”

Read more in the full article here.

“According to Wolf, Macs accounted for 10.5% of total dollars spent on home PCs worldwide during the December quarter, up from just under 4% in the fourth quarter of 2004,” Rogers reports. “Apple’s performance in the U.S. home market was even more impressive — it holds almost 20% of the dollar share.”

Rogers reports, “With a unit share of 5% and nearly 10% respectively in the worldwide PC and U.S. markets, Apple’s dollar growth bodes well for the tech bellwether’s results in 2010… The tech giant’s Mac shipments climbed 33% during the first quarter, reaching 3.36 million units. This surpassed the prior quarter’s then-record shipments of just over 3 million. During its first-quarter conference call, Apple said that its Mac shipment [growth is] double the PC market average.”

Rogers reports, “Apple, which introduced a new iMac and MacBook in October, says that it is enjoying strong demand in the education sector and also in the Asia-Pacific region, where Mac sales grew 54% during the first quarter.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“Engineering, which was often lumped into the beat called ‘SciTech,’ once was strong segment for the Macintosh,” Morgenstern reports. “Then in the early 1990s, the platform’s position was weakened and then lost. But now the Mac appears poised for a strong return.”

Morgenstern reports, “One piece of evidence was the release by Computational Engineering International (CEI) of a Mac-native version of the company’s EnSight CFD, software for analyzing and visualizing computational fluid dynamics… In addition, German developer Graebert this week announced its ARES CAD platform for Mac, Windows and Linux, which supports AutoCAD-compatible command line and scripts.”

Full article, including a recounting of how NASA Mac users once got screwed by an idiotic policy of standardizing on Windows, here.

“Google brought me to Freefall, a Mac and Windows application that, well, tracks satellites all over the earth,” Mincey reports. “What’s special about Freefall, besides the drop dead simple interface and easy search capability, and the fact that it makes my new Mincey Family Telescope a big paperweight with a lens, is the view.”

Mincey reports, “I was trying to view satellites from my telescope here on earth; no mean feat. Freefall [US$34.95] lets you view a bunch of satellites from the view of space—looking earthward from the sky, above the satellites—right on your Mac’s screen.”

Full article, with more info and screenshots, here.

Source: MacDailyNews

The reader is handy for transferring videos and photos from a camera, but you can also use the reader with an SD Card startup disk. This is helpful for when you need to troubleshoot the MacBook Pro.

Roman Loyola of Macworld provided a video on how to create a SD card startup disk for the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros. The video can be found in their Youtube channel: Macworld. Materials needed are SD card with a capacity of at least 8GB, and the OS installation disc that came with the laptop.

Download Macworld Video #114

• Format: MPEG-4/H.264
• Resolution: 480 x 272 (iPhone & iPod compatible)
• Size: 11.5 MB
• Length: 4 minutes, 3 seconds

Loyola’s Notes

“At its default settings, the Mac OS X installation for the new 13-inch MacBook Pro is over 11GB. You can reduce that size by opting not to install items such as printer drivers and language support. In my demonstration, I got the installation down to a little over 6GB. You’ll need an SD card that’s at least 8GB. (There are other ways to reduce the OS installation down, but I do not show them in the video.)

The SD card I used is the 16GB SanDisk Extreme III ($196). The 8GB version is $120. These cards are high-speed cards, which makes them more expensive than your typical SD card. But you can use a more affordable SD card.”

Source: Macworld