Bryan Chaffin

“An annual decline in unit shipments is highly unusual in the PC market,” Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst, compute platforms for iSuppli, said in a statement. “Even in weak years, PC unit shipments typically rise by single-digit percentages.” For perspective, he added, “The last decline — in 2001 — was a 5.1 decrease in unit shipments…

At issue are two board members shared between the two companies — Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Genentech CEO Arthur D. Levinson — and Section 8 of the Clayton Antitrust Act. That Section limits the amount of information that can be shared by directors of two competing companies in an effort to keep companies from…

“For more than two years now I have been eagerly anticipating the day when I could finally write these words: the royalty crisis is over!,” wrote Tim Westergren, founder and current Chief Strategy Officer of Pandora, wrote in a blog post on his company’s site. He added, “Webcasters, artists, and record labels have reached a…

The analyst made the comments in a research note obtained by The Mac Observer. In that note he reiterated his “Overweight” rating for the stock (versus a “Neutral” rating for the sector) and maintained his US$173 price target. “Apple iPhone 3GS sales still look solid now more than two weeks after the initial launch,” he…

“In the interests of transparency, I think it would be necessary for them to disclose something as serious as a liver transplant,” Charles Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, told Bloomberg. “Investors want to know if he’s healthy and if he can continue to run…

The charity campaign has been organized around Feeding America, which used to be called America’s Second Harvest, a group working to provide food-relief to some 25 million low-income people in the U.S. Microsoft’s ad verbiage says it will donate 8 meals per download, with the fine print stipulating that it’s basically $1.15 per download. IE…

Then I remembered American-based Sandisk CEO Eli Harari recently saying that Apple had won the MP3 player war and saying that, “You can’t out-iPod the iPod,” a statement with which I agree, but it really begs the question of, “Why?” Why is it that no one can seem to do what it is that Apple…

Barclays Barclays’ Ben Reitzes was pleased with the number and nature of the products Apple announced, which included a new iPhone, updated MacBook Pros, price drops, more details and a release date for iPhone OS 3.0, and an announcement for Snow Leopard’s release. “While the iPhone announcements were expected,” he wrote in a research note…

According to this source, Mr. Jobs’s recovery “is coming along.” More importantly to Apple observers, he is on schedule to return to work at the end of June, which would be the end of the six-month leave of absence time frame he announced shortly before Macworld in January of this year. “He was one real…

For those working out the numbers in their head, if the Post’s numbers are correct, the Fifth Avenue Apple Store is bringing in an average of $1.2 million in sales each and every day, numbers the Post referred to as “mind-boggling.” In the March quarter of 2009, Apple’s planet-wide Apple Store retail sales clocked in…

Features like MovieMaker have been me-too additions to Windows desperately intended to match iLife features. Zune was an iPod-wannabe. The Zune Marketplace was an App Store gambit. And on and on. This is all old stuff, but there’s one area where I think Microsoft would be best-served by picking one thing (to copy) and sticking…

It’s not that I expect Bing to be a better search engine than Google, or even that Microsoft has any real shot at making Bing be better than Google — but I think Bing has a shot at being better than Yahoo!, and it’s this sort of competition that will push Google and other competitors…

The exploit, known as CVE-2008-5353, is an issue with Sun’s Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which is incorporated into Mac OS X. Sun released a patch for the vulnerability in December of 2008. Mr. Fuller wrote in a blog post, “CVE-2008-5353 allows malicious code to escape the Java sandbox and run arbitrary commands with the permissions…

According to Mr. Kahney, orin0co offered him a screen shot from Mr. Jobs’s purchase history, a screen shot that doesn’t exactly do much to support the notion that he has purchased approximately five items per day, every day, for ten years. The screen shot, he wrote, “includes only three purchases over the busy holiday period,…

An Overweight rating from Barclay’s means, “The stock is expected to outperform the unweighted expected total return of the sector coverage universe over a 12-month investment horizon.” Mr. Reitzes wrote that he expects Apple to reposition the Mac product to keep to stay in line with the declining prices in the market, and repeated his…

Mr. Jones is a fan of Jonny Ive’s. In his filing with the WIPO, the non-governmental body that oversees such issues by treaty, Mr. Jones said: “I’m a web designer living in the UK, and I’ve been a huge fan of Jonathan Ive since I first used an iMac G3 in college in 1998. I…

After ATI was acquired by AMD, Mr. Drebin served as CTO of AMD’s Graphics Product Group, but left in January of 2008. He’s Linked-In profile shows that he had some downtime before joining Apple, which The Inquirer pointed out could well have served as non-compete time. His Linked-In profile shows that he’s currently a “Senior…

The patch can be downloaded by simply logging into the World of Warcraft client. The update is free, and the full version of the latest expansion pack can be purchased at Amazon.com for US$31.49. The patch notes in full: General In order to address issues with the dual talent specialization system, all players will have…