Now, with new MacBook Airs and Mac minis on the shelves and the Mac App Store serving up one million downloads of Lion in a single day, Apple is poised to reap the benefits of what up until last week was pent-up demand for those products, particularly the MacBook Air. According to Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes, Apple’s latest ultraslim laptops will give the company a nice little financial bump for the remainder of the year.
I agree. Rumors of the new MacBook Air were around for many weeks before they were released and I think people held off buying because of that. Couple that with the release of Lion and the flood gates opened on release day.
This is cool. Now two more releases and my Summer is complete. New Mac Pros (for work) and a Nikon D4 or D800 on August 22nd. 🙂
The new MBA reminds me of something barely apropos. Two years ago I was the only Mac user in my family. Yes, as a younger lad I was more of an evangelist, but not any more, I just liked using Macs and the rest of my family went their separate ways.
Then my brother got an iPhone. And then so did my father. And my mother. And my step-father got a Macbook. And my mother got a Mac mini. Then my brother, tired of PCs and finally curious enough to try a Mac, ditched his Dell and got an iMac. Plus an Airport Extreme. And a Magic Trackpad. Then his wife, envious of how easily my brother and niece took to it all, got a Macbook Air (ah, there, a tie-in to the story!). And word has come to me that my other brother now has a Macbook Pro, and he, his wife and their daughter all have iPhones.
The only holdout to switching PCs remaining in my family is my father. But in two years, near total turnover. I no longer disbelieve any suggestion that there is pent-up demand for the Mac or that the Mac business has a soon-to-be-reached ceiling.
Considering the discontinuation of the MacBook, and what I’ve been reading about the intended customers of the MBA, how many potential MBA buyers are the sort of person who cares about Lion in the first place?
Well, my mother (using a Mac mini…the last one before the all-aluminum version) just downloaded Lion (!) and was thrilled to find everything was faster. Might be circumstancial (and is definitely anecdotal), but at any rate she’s not the sort of user that I would imagine would care, generally.