2007 Roundup: Apple gets to the core of its market

Soaring Mac sales and Leopard highlight mega-successful year

Shaun Nichols in California, vnunet.com 24 Dec 2007

Apple seemed to be synonymous with the iPhone throughout 2007. The mobile stole the spotlight all year and overshadowed the company's other operations.

Many of those non-iPhone offerings, however, logged banner years of their own in 2007.

The iPod continued its dominance of the portable media player market throughout the year. After dominating holiday sales in 2006, the iPod continued its reign in 2007 with a makeover of the iPod Nano.

A new model was also added to the line with the iPod Touch. The device had a touch-screen format similar to the iPhone and featured a Wi-Fi internet connection that allowed for web browsing and connection to iTunes.

ITunes made news of its own this summer when Apple's pricing model drew the ire of several major content providers.

Word surfaced in July that Universal Music was about to cancel its deal with iTunes owing to pricing issues. The label later decided to exclude iTunes from its DRM-free music line.

The pricing argument came to a head in September when NBC terminated its contract with Apple and eschewed iTunes in favour of Amazon's video download service.

The studio reportedly wanted a deal that would have raised download prices by as much as $3.

September also brought good news for Apple following an iMac redesign which proved to be a major success for the company in 2007.

MacOS X was less encouraging this year, however. Originally slated for June, the new Leopard version of the operating system was delayed by four months when developers were moved off of the project to work on the iPhone.

When Leopard did launch it was plagued by bugs, including claims that the built-in firewall was all but useless.

Apple experienced further security headaches when the first active malware sample was found for OS X. The Trojan was spread through social engineering and continues to be distributed on fake codec sites.

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