Simply put, the new Mac App Store will be an all-in-one portal for Mac users to browse, download, and update software. How this translates into workflow for businesses is not as simple however. One issue is license management. How will companies manage end-user App Store accounts and ensure company-wide application updates? Along with licensing concerns arises the issue of budgeting and IT cost management. The App Store, while convenient, does not offer Enterprise pricing. Demand will be high for employees to access the store – especially if they’ve experienced the ease of the iOS App Store on iPads and iPhones. Purchasing through individual accounts will be difficult to monitor and application prices difficult to budget. But the simplicity of the iOS experience on iPhones won’t transfer to the Mac App Store for businesses and it won’t relieve the headache that many IT directors will experience.

• AirPrint – Print mail, photos, web pages, and more directly to a printer on a wireless network with an AirPrint-enabled printer.
• AirPlay – Wirelessly stream videos, music, and photos to the new Apple TV, and stream music to AirPlay speakers or receivers, including AirPort Express.
• Find My iPhone, Find My iPad, and Find My iPod touch – The MobileMe feature that helps you locate your missing device and protect its data is now free on any iPhone 4, iPad, or fourth-generation iPod touch running iOS 4.2

Apple unveiled new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops with longer battery lives, faster processors and lower prices today at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. The price on the ultra-thin MacBook Air was also lowered by more than 15 percent. Also introduced was the iPhone 3G S, the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet. It will be available starting June 19.

Along with Sever-class 7200-rpm SATA drives, and 15,000-rpm SAS drives, the new Xserve offers a $500 2.5 inch, 128 GB SSD option (an SSD is essentially solid-state memory acting as a hard drive).
SSD provides an ultra-fast, low-power boot drive alternative. Operating at under 1 watt – versus 12 to 18 watts for a typical spinning drive – this solid-state drive delivers random-access performance that’s up to 20x faster than a SAS drive and up to 48x faster than a SATA drive. And since this 1.8-inch drive is installed in a dedicated location, it doesn’t take up a valuable drive bay, leaving all three bays available for primary storage and RAID applications.

Businesses that have been waiting to upgrade their current servers until they saw what Apple was going to offer should be pleased. The quad-core model starts at $2,999 and the 8-core at $3,599.

The new Mac Pro is a beast

One nice surprise is the sheer volume and easy accessibility of the I/O ports. On the front panel two FireWire 800 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and a headphone minijack. On the back three USB 2.0, two FireWire 800, optical audio in and out, analog audio in and out, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. That is a total of seven USB ports and four FireWire ports.

It looks like Apple managed to improve the design of the MacPro at the same time that they increased performance, a neat trick considering how much performance is improved.

The differences between the newer LED displays and the older displays does not begin and end with finish. The new displays do not include Firewire ports and they only connect to newer laptops that use the Mini DisplayPort connector. If you use anything but a laptop from the new Macbook family the 30-inch Cinema Display is now the only Apple display you can purchase.

If you plan on adding or replacing a Cinema Display in the near future we suggest you call us soon, we can’t predict how long the 30-inch model will be around.

So Apple is walking away from the enterprise market and Snow Leopard will be the death blow to Vista? How can we have such dramatically divergent views on the same subject over a 30-day period of time? In part it is because Apple remains an emotional topic, representing one of the true information te4chnology culture wars. This story line is not new, this is not the first time people have raised warning flags about Apple’s interest in business customers. Things are different this time around because the iPod and the iPhone have been tremendous retail successes and Apple’s financial situation is stronger than it has ever been. Apple is selling one in every five retail computers, with an  even larger share in notebooks. Some see this as evidence that Apple does not need, and therefore will no longer pursue the enterprise space.

We see no evidence that Apple has changed its approach to the enterprise market. Apple has never competed for the bulk of the enterprise market, the low-powered PC that most knowledge workers use for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. That is a high-volume, low margin business. Slap a $500 machine and $500 worth of software on someone’ desk and they can email all day long. Apple’s niche has always been power-users; businesses that load up high-performance machines with more complicated software and spend five to 10 times per employee. Those customers are much higher-margin customers, but they have traditionally been a small segment of the marketplace.

If you look back 10 years and consider that print design and printing represented the bulk of Apple’s business audience, you would wonder how Apple survived at all. Then came the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, and retail customers became the Apple story. But that view is too limited. Apple continues to sell to business customers, and over that time they have expanded the businesses they serve. Apple’s business sales have increased 25 percent year-over-year.  Web development has been a big driver, more than compensating for the decline in print. And then there is video. Apple’s release of Final Cut Pro was incredibly disruptive to the professional video market. A market once dominated by Avid running on Windows is now saturated with Final Cut Pro running on Mac OS. Just look at Avid’s market share and you can get a sense of how disruptive Final Cut Pro has been. To a lesser extent professional audio is also succumbing. The differentiator for Apple have always been the combination of power and quality. There are plenty of powerful PCs, but if you care what something looks like on screen, or when it is printed or rendered, you need to work on a Mac. The user experience — ease of use — has always been the go-to market message for retail and education, but it is the combination of power and quality that drives Apple’s enterprise market. That is why you see more and more Macs in research, product development, and health care environments, supporting users working with complex imaging and 3D modeling.

Now let’s consider some broad market trends. High-speed broadband has driven the growth of video and audio, and of course web-development. Not only are these markets that Apple dominates, they are expanding from creative to the broader enterprise market. So Apple dominates markets that are expanding, not a bad position to be in. And as we noted in an earlier post, the iPod and the iPhone are creating inroads into the traditional enterprise IT space.

Still, what about the enterprise announcement? Is Apple, flush with retail success, abandoning its enterprise customers? Not replacing the enterprise lead. Killing the Xserve Raid. Abandoning FireWire for USB 2.0. Replacing the beautiful, and creative pro-friendly matte monitors with consumer-friendly glossy monitors. Isn’t the evidence there?

John Welch at Macworld strikes an appropriate tone in his post entitled Apple’s enterprise strategy the same as it ever was: Why Apple’s failure to replace a retiring executive isn’t the end of anything. But Welch argues that Apple never had an enterprise strategy, never wanted to sell into the enterprise space. We don’t see it that way. What has been missing from the the recent buzz is an understanding of the reseller’s role in the Apple sales model. Business customers have always relied on Apple resellers to provide the knowledge, integration, and customer support that business customers require. Not that the head of enterprise-marketing has always been an empty seat, but we don’t expect to see negative consequences from this move. If anything, we are hoping to see more attention paid to the critical role resellers in the enterprise channel. The bigger move for resellers and business customers was the decision to have the previously independent direct channel report into the head of channel marketing. This received less attention but is actually more important as it may signal an end to Apple’s efforts to compete with their own business resellers. Apple’s direct channel was able to build direct sales, but it had to do so by sacrificing margin and service quality. So while the buzz is that Apple is abandoning the enterprise, we think the inside scoop may just be that Apple is realigning to better serve the enterprise market.

The 24-inch LED Cinema Display lives up to Apple’s legacy of beautifully designed monitors, but it also moves that legacy forward with environmentally-friendly design. As Apple says, what “makes the LED Cinema Display so remarkable is what it lacks.” It is mercury-free, arsenic-free, brominated flame retardant-free, and polyvinyl chloride-free. The aluminum and glass enclosure is also highly recyclable. Those are very big steps forward, so much so that that the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), which ranks the performance of a product throughout its lifecycle according to its environmental attributes, gave the display the highest rating of EPEAT Gold.

As we noted last week, Apple has discontinued the 23-inch LCD monitor. Pro users have counted on the 23-inch LCD for years as a color-accurate workhorse. The new monitors represent a step-forward in many areas, but the switch from a matte to a glossy screen may not be well received by pros, and the lack of Firewire ports will be a disappointment. As of now Apple is still taking orders for the 20-inch and 30-inch LCD Cinema Displays but we do not know their future plans for these models.