Microsoft’s elephant in the OS room: Apple | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Microsoft’s elephant in the OS room: Apple | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com: "In our Pacific Crest Mosaic surveys, we have seen increasing evidence of Apple taking share in the enterprise market. While Apple is not the only reason for the Microsoft Client shortfall, it seems plausible that it could be a larger factor than acknowledged by Microsoft. As a result, we are somewhat skeptical of Microsoft’s assumption that its Client revenue will snap back next quarter."

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Apple to the Core | PBS

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Apple to the Core | PBS: "Apple has changed processor families twice before in the Macintosh era so it is more likely, not less, that they will change again. It's even possible we'll see a jump to AMD for some machines before the final days of Apple/Intel. But just as the Intel changeover took a year and was predicted to take two, we're 3-4 years out on this transition. Your next Mac will probably have an Intel CPU, but the one after will be all Apple, through and through."

Apple sells

VentureBeat: "While the recent Google and Yahoo quarterly financial results were largely based around more abstract ideas such as paid-clicks, the focus of Apple’s quarterly results were more concrete: computer sales. And boy did Apple sell a lot of computers. Simply put, this was Apple’s strongest second quarter ever."

Apple shipped over 2.2 million Macs in the quarter, representing 51 percent unit growth and 54 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. One reason for this is Apple’s retail stores, which are doing extremely well. On the conference call, Apple stated that 50 percent of the computers sold in the retail stores were sold to customers who had never owned a Mac before. If those numbers hold, the market share gains Apple has been seeing are certainly going to continue.

Overall revenue was up 43 percent from the previous year. Net quarterly profit was $1.05 billion on $1.16 earnings per share. All of these beat analysts expectations easily.

More numbers in Apple’s official release here.

...All of this is good news, so why is the stock dropping in after-hours trading, down over four percent? Well, Apple gave some comparatively weak expectations for next quarter. However, many analysts think Apple is setting the bar low on purpose so that it can continue to blow away numbers as it did today.