What impact has Windows 7 had on the Mac’s sales and market share gains? Not much, according to Joe Wilcox in BetaNews:

Windows 7 did little to slow the Mac’s sales trajectory during fourth quarter, according to NPD. Year over year, Apple doubled US retail unit share—from 5 percent to 10 percent—for PCs selling between $500 and $1,000. More startling, Apple increased its unit share from 79 percent to 90 percent in the market for “premium” PCs, meaning those selling for more than $1,000.

With the iPad, is Apple venturing more strongly in the $500 to $1,000 segment? Yes.

I love this phrase: The iPhone is the Hummer of cellphones. Jenna Wortham in NYT:

Slim and sleek as it is, the iPhone is really the Hummer of cellphones. It’s a data guzzler. Owners use them like minicomputers, which they are, and use them a lot. Not only do iPhone owners download applications, stream music and videos and browse the Web at higher rates than the average smartphone user, but the average iPhone owner can also use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user.

In other words, Apple built a device that everyone loves, and AT&T treated customers like insurance agents. “What? You want to actually use the device?” Hence, a clogged network when users actually used the device.

The result is dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds as AT&T’s cellular network strains to meet the demand. Another result is outraged customers.

Here in New York AT&T’s service is spotty at best and potty at worst. What’s inbetween? A paradoxical love for the iPhone and a growing hatred for AT&T. Life will be better when Verizon gets the iPhone, right? Maybe for awhile.

Cellphone owners using other carriers may gloat now, but the problems of AT&T and the iPhone portend their future. Other networks could be stressed as well as more sophisticated phones encouraging such intense use become popular.

The problem here is that other smartphone users are not using their phones the same way as iPhone owners. No other phone strains AT&T’s network like the iPhone. Despite the obvious public relations black eye, what’s in all this grief for AT&T?

AT&T’s right to be the exclusive carrier for iPhone in the United States has been a golden ticket for the wireless company. The average iPhone owner pays AT&T $2,000 during his two-year contract — roughly twice the amount of the average mobile phone customer. But at the same time the iPhone has become an Achilles’ heel for the company.

The problem here is capacity and demand. AT&T underestimated demand, and in many markets, just does not yet have the capacity to handle the growing usage trends of iPhone owners. John Donovan, of AT&T:

It’s been a challenging year for us. Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones. There’s just no parallel for the demand.

Indeed.

Whatever happened to MMS and tethering? The answer is obvious. AT&T does not have the capacity in the network to meet the demand of iPhone users.

The company has also delayed bandwidth-heavy features like multimedia messaging, or text messages containing pictures, audio or video. It is also postponing “tethering,” which allows the iPhone to share its Internet connection with a computer, a standard feature on many rival smartphones. AT&T says it has no intention of capping how much data iPhone owners use.

If 3G is not so hot, what’s next? Basically, it’s the change from dial-up to broadband, from your PC modem connecting to the phone line, to DSL connecting you to the internet. More speed.

In preparation for the next wave of smartphones and data demands, all the carriers are rushing to introduce the next-generation of wireless networks, called 4G.

Rushing? Since when does a phone company rush? Who’s to blame for AT&T’s mess? Apple? iPhone users? AT&T?

From my friend Alexis Kayhill on Mac360:

Here’s a little known and less understood fact of using a Mac (or a Windows PC). Emptying the trash (or the stupid recycle bin) doesn’t really delete files.

What about Secure Empty Trash in the Finder menu?

Secure Empty Trash merely overwrites the data seven times, according to some U.S. Department of Defense standard. And we all know how good those guys are at protecting data.

Here, here! Is there a better way, oh great Value Vixen™ of Southern California?

If you’re really paranoid about deleting the data on your Mac, and your whole world would collapse and you’d have to go into a Witness Protection Program of some sort if anyone ever found those secret files, then you need Permanent Eraser. First, it really, really scrambles the data you’re trying to erase. Not seven times. Not 20 times. But 35 times.

Permanent Eraser is free and also erases CD-RWs and DVD-RWs. Typically superb Mac utility. One click or drag and drop and you’re done.

Is anyone keeping a count of the number of browsers for Macs? As if there are not enough browsers already, Google provides a link to their highly touted Chrome browser, but with a warning for users.

Whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software. How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.

Caveat emptor. I love those guys.

MacDailyNews has a tendency to remember what analysts, prognosticators, and competitors say about Apple’s chances in any given venture. For example:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in” - Ed Colligan, Palm CEO, November 16, 2006

“The iPhone’s willful disregard of the global handset market will come back to haunt Apple” - Tero Kuittinen, RealMoney.com, January 18, 2007

“Consumers are not used to paying another couple hundred bucks more just because Apple makes a cool product. Some fans will buy [iPhone], but for the rest of us it’s a hard pill to swallow just to have the coolest thing” - Neil Strother, NPD Group analyst, January 22, 2007

There are many more, most from 2007, before the iPhone launched. Fun reading but not so much noise since then.