Dear Friends,

New data from Piper Jaffray’s teen survey show that Apple is dominating that market at least as far as mobile devices are concerned. They have 71% of the teen market for smart watches and almost 70% for iPhones and 64% for iPad. Another survey has Apple Mac sales showing positive growth while literally the entire PC market is in decline.

I have been playing around with Amazon’s Echo and I have to say that I like it a lot. I wake up each morning and say “Alexa, what’s new?” and I get the news reports from NPR, CNN, Huffington Post and BBC as well as ESPN Sports and the local weather report. During the day, I ask Alexa to “play the blues” or “play some classical music” and while the speaker is not as good as my Sonos system it does fill the room. I can be around the corner or across the room and the Echo can hear me. Apple needs to step it up a bit and get Siri on the Mac or even better yet, integrated into their networking gear. I would love to be able to tell my Sonos app to play my music from my iTunes library!

Speaking of networking here’s a Kibbles & Bytes exclusive! This isn’t for everyone but if you have a big house and your Wi-Fi signal isn’t reaching that far corner of the house this could solve three problems for you! I am bundling the Apple Factory Refurbished 3TB Time Capsule with an Apple Factory Refurbished Airport Express. Both have the same 1-year Apple warranty as new but you can save some bucks. The 3TB Time Capsule gives you the Airport Extreme wireless access point and automatic wireless back-ups to the integrated 3 terabyte drive. The Airport Express allows you to extend that wireless network. Normally this bundle is around $500 new, but this week for Kibbles & Bytes readers, while supplies last you can buy this refurbished bundle for only $325.99!

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  • Macbooks and Macbook Air Upgraded

    Apple announced some changes to the 12-inch MacBook and 13-inch MacBook Air this week. Let’s talk about the MacBook Air first. Apple discontinued the 13-inch MacBook Air models that had 4GB of RAM and made them sport 8GB. There were no other changes to this model but the additional RAM comes at no additional cost as Apple doubled the RAM but kept the price the same at $999 for the 128GB SSD unit and $1299 for the 256GB SSD.

    With just this minor update to the MacBook Air we can speculate that perhaps this unit is on its way out within the next year. The MacBook Air does not have the Retina display nor does it support the latest in Intel mobile processors. On the other hand, it is Apple’s best selling laptop.

    The changes to the MacBook were more significant. They added a Rose Gold (er…pink) color which might actually be a nice option for some. More importantly, Apple went to the new sixth-generation dual-core Intel Core M processors which run at clock speeds up to 1.3 gigahertz, with Turbo Boost up to 3.1 gigahertz. The revamped notebooks also feature faster 1866 megahertz memory.

    This new processor yields increases in performance from 15-20% in initial testing. With the Intel HD Graphics 515, the new MacBook has about 25 percent faster graphics performance. Speed has also been enhance with new, faster PCIe-based flash storage.

    The lower power requirements and a slightly larger battery has also improved battery life, with the Apple claiming the new MacBook offers up to 10 hours of wireless surfing and up to 11 hours of movie watching.

    While some were expecting additional ports or an improved FaceTime camera, these features did not make the cut.

    We should have all the models in stock next week as well as some great deals on the newly discontinued models.