Kibbles & Bytes Blog

I will be heading out to San Francisco for the Apple Specialist Marketing Cooperative’s annual meeting and then quickly packing up for the journey back to Vermont when I return. It will be good to meet with the other Apple Specialists from around the country and exchange ideas and renew old friendships. I seldom leave these meetings without at least a few new ideas and a refreshed sense of energy.

That will mean that Emily will probably have to fill in for me for Kibbles for at least this next coming week and I am sure she will do an awesome job!

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes team,

_Don, Dean, Mike & Bronson_

In case you missed it at the top, here is Don’s exclusive refurbished MacBook Air bundle. Get a great computer in like-new condition with 3 years of AppleCare coverage, a 1TB hard drive to back up to, and an extra power cable.

*Save $100!*

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With Mother’s Day right around the corner, we have everything Mom needs with *HUGE* iPad bundles! There is also no better time to congratulate that recent grad of yours with any of our great deals on new and refurbished Macs.

Also, visit any of our stores for a FREE 30 minute one-on-one lesson with the purchase of any new Mac!

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When I was in high school (and even before that) I loved to make movies with friends and my brother and sister. Back then, in the late 1990s, we had what was basically a shoulder-mounted VCR. For the time, it was pretty amazing technology. It had a loading tray for a full sized video tape cassette. It had a giant battery that allowed you to film maybe an hour or so. This was before small digital cameras were everywhere and memory was so cheap and abundant that you could just dump video data to it without a second thought. I used that camcorder to make lots of silly movies with my brother and sister. I remember one where I took a piece of red cellophane and taped it over the lens and ran around the backyard filming. I called it “The Fly” and I made buzzing noises while running around. I made another movie called “Who Wants to Fight a Million Bears?” where my brother would go into a room, make all sorts of noises and come out for an interview about how the fight went.

When I was in high school, technology had improved and I was working after school at the local community access TV station. They had lots of cameras there friends and I could use as well as a Mac Pro G5 and an iMac with Final Cut Pro. Friends and I made a few “movies” of ourselves just doing stupid things. The cameras were better too. We primarily used a Canon GL-1 and a small JVC or Panasonic. They all used MiniDV which was far better quality than VHS. We still wrote out most of our projects to VHS when we were done, but the last movie we did right before we finished high school we burned to a DVD.

Nowadays, though, digital cameras are so plentiful and high quality that anyone can take great quality video. Many people even choose to use the iPhone as a camera to shoot professional-looking videos or short films. I’ve seen some of these and they really do look amazing. It’s almost impossible to tell it was filmed with a phone.

I don’t have an iPhone though, and am not likely to get one any time soon (I still like my recently acquired Palm Pre 2, thank you very much!). I do have an iPad Air, though. Recently I looked into what could be done to use the camera on it to record decent quality video. Fortunately, there are options! The first thing you’ll want to consider is how to mount the iPad onto a tripod or at least some more stable way to hold it so your video isn’t jumping all around. I ended up trying out a case by iOgrapher. I like it because of two main things. First, you can add lenses to it easily. Second, it has two accessory shoes so you can mount a flash, or a microphone, or whatever you want. It also mounts into any tripod. It also has two handles that let you have a firmer grip on the iPad so stability while moving around is greatly improved. I’ve found it works really well and have enjoyed filming things once again.

Of course, you can use the built-in camera app to do all of this, but I found it’s lacking substantially in ability to really unlock the capability of the camera, especially on the iPad. After lots of research, I eventually settled on an app called MoviePro. It’s only $4.99 in the app store and it’s absolutely worth it! It lets you set almost anything you want including things I really like such as frame rate, focus, a whole pile of resolutions, white balance, ISO and much more! It even makes zooming pretty easy. I’ve been absolutely thrilled with how nice the videos I’ve shot with it have come out.

Everything I’ve mentioned here was specific to me using my iPad Air, but pretty much any iPad or iPhone will work just as well (all the way back to the iPhone 4S actually). Combine all this with the ability to compile together nice looking effects and titles in iMovie on either the iPad or your Mac, and you’ll be making loads of cool videos in no time!

Apple announced their quarterly financial results for the first three months of the calendar year this week and once again Apple set records, clearly smashed the analysts’ predictions and continued to blaze new territory for the world’s most valuable company. Apple posted revenue of $58 billion and a net profit for the quarter of $13.6 billion or $2.33 per share. This was 27% better than last year’s $45.6 billion in revenue and $10.6 billion in profit.

Apple’s sales were driven by the iPhone, which accounted for over $40 billion in revenue. They sold over 61 million iPhones and for the first time Apple sold more iPhones in China than in the USA. While the rest of the PC market is in decline, Mac sales also increased year-over-year with over 4.5 million Macs sold, which put Apple in positive territory when virtually all other manufacturers are seeing declining sales.

The iPad was soft, although Apple did sell 12.6 million iPad but that is off from last year by about 29%. Tim Cook said that he feels that the iPad will rebound with the IBM partnership. First time buyers of 40% in the USA and over 70% in China also indicate that the iPad is far from saturated in the market. The App Store and services showed significant growth, however, with nearly $5 billion in revenue.

Apple increased its quarterly dividend to shareholders by 11 cents per share making Apple the largest dividend payer in the S&P 500. They also increased their stock buy-back program to $140 billion in an effort to enhance the return to shareholders from Apple success. Since August of 2012, Apple has returned over $112 billion to shareholders.

ApplePay got a big boost as Best Buy and Discover card announced they will be supporting ApplePay and it looks to me, at least, that Apple is going to win that mobile payment battle, too, and become the de facto payment platform. I know I am finding more and more places that accept ApplePay and it was way, WAY too easy to buy my Apple Watch online with ApplePay!

Tim Cook also revealed some more of the initiatives that Apple is taking to protect the environment including a 40-megawatt solar farm in Sichuan province that will generate far more that the amount of energy used by all of Apple’s offices and retail stores in China. He also announced a partnership with the Conservation Fund to permanently protect more than 36,000 acres of working forest in Maine and North Carolina.

Apple predicted that their next quarter will see revenue in the neighborhood of $47 billion and my guess is that I will have to come up with yet another verb to describe what Apple did to the Street. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said: “And so it’s tough to find something in the numbers not to like.”

Congratulations for an awesome record breaking quarter to Tim Cook and to the whole Apple team!

_Dear Friends,_

Twenty years ago when we started the company, Apple was struggling and I clearly remember an early meeting at Apple headquarters where the goal was set for Apple to become a $5 billion company. These were the days when Michael Dell, when asked what he would do with Apple, said that he would liquidate the company and give the money to the shareholders. Well, those were the days before Steve Jobs came back and the obituaries for Apple were in every paper. Fast forward a couple of short decades and Apple is putting up *$50 billion QUARTERS* and is poised to post a $50 billion annual profit. The greatest story in American business history continues as Apple posted a 27% year-over-year increase in sales. That is unprecedented not only for the largest company on the planet but also for any mature company. Normally, that growth slows and a company’s size takes over.

I have “*run out of words*”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dictionary.com-dictionary/id308750436?mt=8&at=11lb7k to describe Apple’s quarter after quarter record-setting results. It is simply amazing that Apple continues to set record after record even in the face of a maturing market and increased competition. I will go over the numbers below, but Apple outperformed even their own optimistic projections and this is all before the Apple Watch has had an impact.

Speaking of the Apple Watch, I did finally order mine and I expect to see it in June. There were reports that tattoos might interfere with the watch’s sensors so I guess I’ll have to test that out, too, or wear the watch on my other wrist. The initial reviews from journalists were pretty positive overall but the reviews now coming in from consumers are overwhelmingly positive. Many of the first to get their watch have already integrated it into their lifestyle. Battery life seems to be a non-issue and apparently the Apple Watch is more water resistant than expected, too.

I was able to re-stock on some of the Apple Certified Refurbished MacBook Airs last week. These Macbook Airs have been brought back to “as-new” condition by Apple and carry Apple’s 1-year warranty. They are eligible for AppleCare, too, which not only extends your 1-year warranty to 3 years but also extends your 90 days of free technical support to 3 years as well. This technical support not only covers your MacBook Air but also the Mac OS and other Apple software.

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes special features the Apple Certified Refurbished 13-inch MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM and a 256 GB solid state drive. It features the latest in wireless technology with Bluetooth and 802.11ac wifi. Weighing in at less than 3 pounds this unit has USB ports, a Thunderbolt port, and a SD card slot. This could be the ideal Mac for your grad or for Mom or Dad. This week I am bundling it with AppleCare protection so that you have that full 3 years of coverage. In addition, because most people need two chargers, we are bundling an extra Apple 45 watt MagSafe 2 power adapter so you can have one at your desk and one to carry with you. To complete the package, and because we always want you to have your data backed up, we are including the Seagate 1 TB Backup Plus Slim Portable Drive. Normally, this bundle would sell for $1300 but for exclusively for Kibbles & Bytes readers you can buy this for only $1199!

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