ByMike Moffit

Dear Friends,

Merry Christmas! I’ll be heading over to my daughter’s house to play Santa for the grand kids and breathing a sigh of relief that we have another holiday season under our belt. I want to send the very best wishes for a happy holiday to you and your family from our family here at Small Dog Electronics.

The results are barely in, but so far, it is very clear that the iPad was the most popular gift this year. Even though we thought we had stocked plenty of iPads, we did experience shortages of some models. The Apple TV was probably the second most popular followed by the iPod touch. But all Apple products were flying off our shelves. My team worked some long hours and we tried our best to treat every customer as if they were our only customer!

As it has become a tradition, I will do our Apple Year in Review in this issue and wrap up the year next week with a review of our 2010 predictions.

Thank you so much for your patronage this holiday season; we love our customers and hope you have a joyous and peaceful Christmas!

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  • Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes. Merry Christmas to all! Your Kibbles & Bytes team, Don, Kali, Ed &…

  • Apple: 2010 Year in Review

    *January/February*

    Apple started the year off right by introducing a game-changing product that was an instant hit. The iPad was introduced by Steve Jobs, and while the name was universally critiqued, it seems natural now as millions have been sold.

    Demand outstripped supply from the very start, and tens of thousands of innovative apps made the iPad a useful tool right out of the gate. I used it while traveling to China shortly after it became available and left my Mac at home. Hey, this product was so popular that my 90-year old mom had her doctor write me a prescription for an iPad for her (of course, Hapy and I filled that!).

    While it is big news, Apple’s financial results were also historic and record-breaking! They sold 3.4 million Macs, 8.7 million iPhones and 21 million iPods!

    *March/April*

    iPads started shipping and selling as fast as we could get them in the door. Apple posted record earnings again with the best non-holiday quarterly results ever.

    Apple not only makes the most exciting and innovative products on the planet, but also has one of the most effective management teams in place to manage this astronomical growth. While many times, Steve Jobs gets the credit for Apple’s success, I know that even a visionary leader like Steve needs the management team to make it work.

    Tim Cook, John Brandon, Peter Oppenheimer and others on the team must also have visionary leadership to coordinate development, production, distribution and promotion. Just think of all the pieces that went into the very successful iPad launch. Even though every company feels their new product will be a smashing success, you never truly know until the orders roll in. Will 200,000 units be enough or 2,000,000

    *May/June*

    Apple’s market capitalization topped Microsoft’s for the first time in a very long while. Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 at the World Wide Developers conference and another Apple hit was born! Apple upgraded the venerable Mac mini, OS X 10.6.4, Safari and MobileMe.

    *July/ August*

    Apple got caught in antenna-gate, even though almost all cell phones suffer from the same malady. By the end of August, antenna-gate was history, iPhone 4 was selling like crazy and everyone was past that except for the misguided gnomes at Consumer Reports.

    Apple released a slew of upgrades including the iMacs, Magic Trackpad and 12-core Mac Pros!

    Oh yeah, and Apple posted record revenue and earnings (yawn)…

    *September/October*

    iPods! Apple introduced new iPod shuffles, going back a generation to put the controls back on the iPod. They also introduced new iPod nanos that are smaller than ever, but lose the video function, and a new iPod touch that became the hottest selling iPod ever.

    Small Dog opens their newest store in the Mall of New Hampshire and immediately does simultaneous ewaste collections in New Hampshire and Vermont maintaining our distinction as the only electronics retailer that has recycled more electronics than we have sold.

    Apple released the awesome new MacBook Air with a new 11-inch size and faster processors, faster boot times and larger flash ram for drives. I immediately ordered up my 13-inch!

    Apple also announced the Mac App Store that will open in January and previewed Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, set to drop in 2011. The Mac Store will offer Apple apps such as the iWork suite and more for download. We will see soon what the impact of this is!

    Oh yeah, once again, Apple posted record revenue and earnings…

    *November/December*

    With everything that Apple has introduced this year, the holiday season line-up has proved to be pretty powerful and diverse in its options for everyone (and at great price points–I know so many people who have purchased Apple TVs as the go-to gift for under $100). We expect that this momentum will continue through the new year. We’ve never been more excited to sell all these amazing new toys and tools!

    “Image source”:http://www.deeprhythms.com/thelonious_funk_sessions/thelonious_funk_sessions_year_end_review_110_part_2_of_5.php

  • Do I Really Need Malware Protection?

    __Note: This article was a popular post in our last Tech Tails, so we have posted an excerpt here. For the full article, “click here”:http://bit.ly/gxreWK to go to our blog, Barkings! -KH__

    I occasionally get customers who say their systems are running very slowly. They may be brand new or a couple of years old, and the actual cause varies. Maybe they upgraded to the latest version of an application and now need more RAM. Maybe their hard disk is running low on space, or perhaps it’s failing. Quite often, it’s because they installed a bunch of applications that are auto-launching at login.

    Every so often though, I will get someone who has done a little research on the web and has convinced him or herself that they have some sort of virus or spyware and want to know how to get rid of it. Just for the record, it is __highly__ unlikely that a virus is the cause. In order to understand why, there are a few key points to know regarding the differences between Windows and OS X.

    …

    How does malware infect a computer? To understand that, a few definitions are in order.

    Malware is an encompassing term which includes viruses, spyware, and adware, and is used to describe any program that serves no purpose other than to make your life miserable. A virus in computer terminology is an application designed to replicate itself and spread to other computers, typically causing data loss of some form.

    Spyware collects information about you and sends it to some outside entity without your knowledge or approval. One form of spyware, known as a keylogger, will record what you type in order to steal logins and passwords.

    Adware is an application that puts pop-up advertisements on your screen, trying to get you to buy things you don’t need or visit sites you were better off not knowing about. In most cases, adware is a harmless annoyance, but it can slow your system down.

    “See the rest of the article here.”:http://bit.ly/gxreWK

  • Apple Updates iPhoto to 9.1.1

    On Tuesday, Apple released iPhoto 9.1.1, which contained a series of bug fixes and a slew of minor enhancements for the company’s popular photo application.

    Following the launch of iLife ’11 earlier in the Fall, many early adopters griped over the seemingly reduced email functionality introduced in the software. Though email themes were one of the main features highlighted during the iPhoto portion of the ‘Back to the Mac’ keynote, the latest iteration of Apple’s longstanding application omitted support for third-party email clients–which seemed, to some, a step backwards.

    Thankfully with version 9.1.1, Apple has responded to user feedback and enabled support for third-party clients in addition to several other improvements. While tuning up the email portion of the application, Apple has also included several new themes as well as the ability to easily resize photos within email.

    While other changes are fairly minor, they are listed as follows in the support document accompanying the software update.

    * Adds a preference allowing photos to be emailed using an external email application
    * Adds “Classic” and “Journal” themes to email.
    * Photos attached to an email can now be sized to Small, Medium or Large
    * Improves reliability when upgrading a library from an earlier version of iPhoto
    * iPhoto now correctly preserves the sort order of Events after upgrading a library
    * Event titles displayed in headers can now be edited in Photos view
    * Addresses a problem that could cause duplicate photos to be added to a MobileMe album
    * Scrolling overlay now correctly displays ratings when photos are sorted by rating
    * Photos are now sorted correctly when a rating is changed and photos are sorted by rating
    * Fixes a problem that could cause text formatting controls to become inaccessible when editing a calendar

    Apple recommends the update for all users of iPhoto ’11 and has made it available both on their “download page”:http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1342 and through Software Update.

    Please note this update requires Mac OS X 10.6.3 or later, weighs in at 62.09 MB, and requires a copy of the iLife ’11 software suite. Per usual, we recommend running a Time Machine backup prior to installing any updates. If iPhoto ’11 has taught us anything so far, it’s that you can “never be too careful with your data.”:http://blog.smalldog.com/article/4006/apple-responds-to-iphoto-11-data-loss-issue/