Here are your daily Apple news items and rumors for Wednesday:
On the Same Page: Apple‘s (NASDAQ:AAPL) latest upgrade to its MacBook Air operating system OS X, called Lion, was released July 20. Its marquee feature is it brings the Apple home experience more in line with the app-centric experience of its portable devices. Those devices, namely the iPad and iPhone, will see their iOS operating system updated this fall. Come 2012, though, iOS and OS X likely will become the same operating system, according to Jeffries & Co. analyst Peter Misek. Misek told Barron’s in a Wednesday report that he believes Apple will ship new MacBook Air models alongside the iPad 3 and a new iPhone during the first half of 2012. All of these devices will run on the same custom A6 processor — a successor to the A5 processor used in the second-generation iPad — and utilize the same operating system that melds the best features of both iOS and OS X. The MacBook Pro and Mac desktop lines will continue using OS X Lion until 2016, when they also will make the transition. The A6 process will be, Misek said, “the first such multi-device platform capable of PC-like strength.”
Last Place in Tablet Race: Tablets running Google‘s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operating system might not be the collective tortoise to the iPad’s hare, as some analysts expect. According to a new iSuppli report published at 9 to 5 Mac, despite the fact most Android tablets like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Motorola‘s (NYSE:MMI) Xoom are technically superior to the iPad, they won’t be catching up to Apple’s sales any time soon. The chief reason for this is even though Apple doesn’t have the strongest hardware, its tailor-made software — the iOS software — performs with more efficiency and ease than competitors. “Since Apple controls both the operating system and hardware design of the iPad,” said iSuppli analyst Wayne Lam, “It is able to attain design efficiencies that other tablet manufacturers cannot. These efficiencies become obvious in areas like the memory and the battery, where Apple maintains advantages in cost, space savings and performance compared with every competitor in the business.”
Boot Camp Has Needs: It’s easy to forget that when Apple switched to using Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) processors in its Mac computers, it also created a utility called Boot Camp that allowed users to install Microsoft‘s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows operating system on those same machines. OS X Lion doesn’t do away with this feature, but in the same way that the new operating system upgrade is forcing modernity on Mac devotees, it’s also requiring those rare Mac Windows users to upgrade, as well. Lion’s Boot Camp 4 requires the Windows 7 operating system, forgoing support of both Vista and the seemingly immortal Windows XP. Users with those Windows versions installed will be allowed to keep Boot Camp 3 running on their machines. Microsoft plans to officially stop supporting Windows XP in April 2014, nearly 13 years after the operating system was first released.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at @ajohnagnello and become a fan of InvestorPlace on Facebook.
