When Apple’s sales numbers for its Mac computers began to falter in October of last year, fans of Redmond could barely contain their glee. My friend, a Microsoft evangelist, made sure he pointed out Cupertino’s struggles as much as possible. Well, it looks like Apple’s troubles are about to end.

Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty says that the revised MacBook line has done much to get sales going again. It also seems cheaper Mac prices may be also doing a world of good for the manufacturer as well. She now expects 2.5 million Macs to be sold in the April-June quarter.

Year-over-year this would mean only a 1 percent decrease in sales, which in this tough economic climate is fairly respectable. She also goes on to say in May shipments were up 25 percent versus only 1 percent for the PC industry at large.

This shows that the company should be able to regain some market share it had lost as a result of weaker Mac sales. Huberty seems pretty confident that this would also result in solid performance over the next two quarters, typically Apple’s busiest. It will be interesting to watch.

(Hat tip: AppleInsider)

[NOTE: 2/2/09 - This is an updated version of the original post from Sunday.]

I am writing this for those of you who may be daring enough to attempt an install of Windows 7 on your Macs. Yes, it may be blasphemy, but even us Macheads are a little curious sometimes, right?

Anyway (to me) the install was quite painless. What you want to do is open up your Applications, then select Utilities. Open up Boot Camp Assistant and Follow the instructions. Even though it asks for a XP or Vista disk, the Windows 7 disc will work.

Just make sure you select the partition labeled BOOTCAMP! Any other one could wipe your Mac OS clean.

The install went without a hitch, but I ran into serious problems in getting any drivers installed. All the instructions I’ve seen (here and here) seem to suggest the Boot Camp installer on the Leopard disk works fine.

Not for me, I got this:

That doesn’t seem to be happening with other folks, however. The instructions don’t provide for this. I’m wondering whether or not the version of my disk (10.5.1) may have something to do with it: the Boot Camp Installer is different as its an earlier version.

There is a way to fix this however if Boot Camp is failing. It involves taking the following steps:

1) Create a folder on the hard drive. For the sake of convenience, I placed it on my desktop for easy access. Name it “BootCamp” or whatever you’d like.
2) Open up the CD’s contents. For you Mac folks, this process in Windows 7 is Computer > right click on DVD drive > Open.
3) Copy the entire contents to that folder you have just created.
4) Download this file: Bootcamp.msi.
5) Place that downloaded file in the Apple directory of the copied version of the DVD, it should overwrite the previous one.
6) Run the setup.exe file. Boot Camp should install properly.

In some cases, there has been reports that this has not worked. Let us know if it doesn’t for you. But it should for most.

So far all features appear to work normally, including sound. I have also noticed the residual benefit of a much quicker load time coming into Windows.

Parallels Desktop for Mac was the first software product that let you run virtualized copies of Windows within OS X on a Mac. It was a feat which created the closest thing in existence to an ideal computing platform, as far as I’m concerned. But Parallels ended up in fierce competition with VMWare’s Fusion, and version 2.0 of Fusion was the most highly-evolved way to run Windows on a Mac.

The rivalry between Parallels and Fusion remains one of the coolest ones in computing: Both of these nifty products keep getting better. And today, Parallels is back with Desktop for Mac 4.0.

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I’m telling you, I’ve given up trying to predict what Apple will announce at its press events, such as the one that’ll happen tomorrow in San Francisco. Safe predictions (“The event is called ‘Let’s Rock,’ so it’s likely that it will involve new iPods”) are boring, boring, boring. Out-there ones (“Apple will release a touch-screen Mac tablet”) are too random. And the most interesting things that happen at Apple events are usually so unpredictable that nobody predicted them.

That doesn’t mean I’m not curious, though, or that there aren’t things I’d like to see announced. So in lieu of a list of predictions, here’s a wish list, in rough order of its chances of actually being announced tomorrow (that doesn’t count as a prediction, does it?).
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How much data do I download from the Internet a month? I have no idea, and it’s probably not all that much. But I’m still concerned about Comcast’s plan to cut off customers who are a little download-crazy.
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Pity the poor Mac Mini. After being unveiled with plenty of hoopla in January 2005 as “the most affordable Mac ever,” it departed the limelight with surprising swifness. The glossy white micro-Mac has received only minor updates such as CPU upgrades and actually got less affordable when the base model went from $499 to $599. Last year, there were even premature reports of the Mini’s imminent death, and most Mac enthusiasts didn’t seem too griefstricken at the prospect of its demise.

But the Mini lives–and even though $599 is no longer anywhere near a dirt-cheap price for a computer, it remains the cheapest Mac. It also comes in a super-small package that’s still fun and distinctive. So it’s the subject of my fourth excessively in-depth Mac-vs.-PC price comparison. My goal, as always, is to gauge whether you pay a “Mac Tax” when you buy a Mini instead of a roughly comparable Windows PC.

Before we get started, here are links to earlier comparisons in this series, just in case you missed ‘em:

Round one: A mid-range MacBook vs. custom-configured Windows laptops.
Round two: The cheapest MacBook vs. cheap Windows laptops.
Round three: The iMac vs. Windows all-in-ones

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So help me, I’m addicted to comparing the prices of Macs and Windows PCs. That’s okay, though–judging from site traffic, a startling quantity of Technologizer readers seem to be addicted to reading and discussing my comparisons. On Thursday, I contrasted a mid-range MacBook with custom-configured Windows laptops. On Saturday, I followed up by comparing the cheapest MacBook to cheap Windows laptops from Best Buy. And today? Well, today I’m in the mood to look at desktops aimed at consumers.

Apple, of course, makes no typical desktop PCs for consumers; we’re now in the second decade of the all-in-one iMac. The unified-monitor-and-CPU form factor never conquered the Windows world, but several major manufacturers offer units that combine that design’s space-saving virtues with a splash of Apple-like flair. What say we compare the current 20-inch iMac to some Windows-based iMacalikes?

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McCracken’s Fifth Rule of Tech Journalism states that reaction to anything one writes about Macs is likely to be incredibly passionate–and that you can write one story and catch flack for being both mindlessly pro-Mac and mindlessly anti-Mac. I shoulda remembered that when I decided to write “Are Macs More Expensive?“, which is already one of the most-read, most-commented-upon things I’ve written for Technologizer. I didn’t mean to provoke so much strong opinion, but I did, in spades.

That said, I’m sure enjoying reading the reaction to the story in the form of comments on the story itself as well as discussion elsewhere on the Web. As I mentioned in the story, I’m going to continue trying to answer the question in additional posts that compare different types of Macs to similar Windows machines, so this conversation is going to continue for awhile.

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The history of Apple is so long and interesting that some amazingly weighty tomes have been written about it. But I don’t think you need to pore over hundreds of pages to get the gist of the company’s journey. Actually, more than with any other computer company, its advertising tells much of the story. And thanks to YouTube, it’s all a few clicks away, and watching it is downright addictive.

I started to put together this video timeline starting in the 1970s and working my way forward to the present day. Then I realized that it’s more fun–and much bloggier–to begin with current commercials and travel backwards in time. Join me, won’t you?

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