Video Drives Apple's Innovation

from streaming media:
SAN FRANCISCO—As happened last year, Apple succeeded in turning heads
just after the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). At last year's event,
Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone, which he reported at this
year's keynote on Tuesday is only second behind the Blackberry in
terms of smartphone sales in the U.S. After being on the market for
exactly 200 days, Apple has sold 4 million to date or 20,000 iPhones
every day. From a national perspective, Apple's iPhone in its first
quarter of shipping stood at 19.5% of the total market, behind
Research In Motion's Blackberry at 39.0% but better than Palm,
Motorola, and Nokia combined.

"We equaled these three in first 90 days of shipment," said an
exuberant Jobs. "The numbers for the December quarter, when they are
announced, look like they'll be even better."

About an hour prior to this year's keynote at Macworld San Francisco
(MWSF), though, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) fought back
with a well-timed press release titled "2008 International CES Reigns
as Global Stage for New Technology Innovation." But, as happened last
year, Apple pushed aside the critics and released several key products
that will drive the CES companies back to the drawing board.

The one that will get the most attention as a hardware gadget is a new
ultra-thin Macbook laptop called Macbook Air. The product has
impressive specifications (incredible thinness of .76" to .016" – 60%
thinner than the next closest competitor, the Sony TZ series which is
1.2" to .8" thick – a 13.3" widescreen and a 45 nanometer Core 2 duo
at 1.6Ghz standard or 1.8Ghz option). Apple asked Intel to shrink the
Core 2 Duo by 60%, which Jobs said was the single most important
innovation to allow Apple the ability to build Macbook Air. Of course,
with H.264 as the primary codec in Apple's arsenal and a move to HD
content playback, Apple's desire to put a Core 2 Duo in the Macbook
Air was a strict requirement, as no single core processor would be
able to consistently handle H.264 decoding of HD movies. The battery
decision—Apple claims 5 hours of battery life on the new Macbook
Air—is as much about being able to complete the viewing of a movie as
it is about application productivity.