From: Ralph Megna <ralph@macastronomy.com>

Date: November 15, 2007 10:37:52 AM MST

To: <Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: Re: Imaging Source Abandoning FireWire?

Milton, with all due respect — and I do appreciate your frustrations as a developer with Apple — none of this is a likely scenario.  Ask any stock analyst (or stockholder like me), and they will tell you that what is driving Apple’s stock price upwards these days is the growth in Mac sales.  From a lousy 2% or 3% for years, the Mac’s current US retail market share is at least 6%, and may be higher.  There is evidence that in laptops, Apple’s US retail market share is somewhere between 16% and 20%.  These figures are reinforced by considerable casual evidence — my office is located on the edge of a major university and the number of MacBooks at the Starbucks and other gathering places has exploded in the last year or so.

As for the “fiasco that is Leopard,” I have to strongly disagree as a user.  It may be causing you development fits — again, this is something I can appreciate but don’t personally know — but there is absolutely no question that this is the best OS I have ever used on a personal computer, and my experience goes back nearly 30 years.  Leopard has been snappy and stable on my MacBookPro and, except for some weird behaviors from Microsoft Office 2004 (which is having to run under Rosetta), all of my work applications are behaving just fine.  Its initial adoption by the market — over 2 million copies sold the first weekend — equal to the sales of Vista the first few days — clearly suggests that this will be the preferred OS for Mac for the next few years.

And as for iPhones and iPods, it might be useful to remember that all iPhones and a growing number of iPods are running OSX, and it will soon be clear that Apple sees these computing platforms, too.  Having millions and millions of additional devices running the same core OS as a Mac will only strengthen the overall Apple/Mac ecosystem.

There is little doubt that Apple is experiencing some growing pains associated with its surprising string of successes, and I am not advocating blind allegiance over reality.  But it is useful to understand that Apple’s struggle to address some of these problems is as basic as getting buildings constructed in Cupertino to house the additional people needed to develop and support its products.  Apple’s core commitment to ship great products remains and as best as I can tell, it is delivering.

Ralph Megna

“I'd be much more concerned that Apple dumps the Mac altogether in maybe 5 years and becomes a "Consumer Electronics" company to produce phones, pods and iWare etc. Frankly given the fiasco that is Leopard and the atrocious developer support we get now a days, maybe they should stick to pods”