Apple began its product showcase by announcing a new operating system for the Mac called Mavericks, moving away from its penchant for naming its computer software after big cats. The new OS can now handle multiple display and tagging of documents, among other new features. Tim Cook kicked off Apple's 24th annual developers conference in San Francisco.
"The MacBook has continued to define the future of the notebook. It's the number one notebook in the US, " Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed. "The annual average growth rate for Mac is 15% versus 3% for PCs," he added.
In an unusual move, the company also shared the stage with little-known startup Anki, which was given the opportunity to show off a game.
Craig Federighi, the company's senior vice president for software engineering, announced the latest version of its OSX operating system, named Mavericks. Some of the new features of this update are improved document finding capability called Finder, tagging, support for multiple displays and improved battery life and processor performance.
Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller unveiled the refreshed Macbook Air. The laptops, available with 11- and 13-inch screens, are powered by Intel's new Haswell processor, with 2X graphics processing unit, have up to 3TB hard disk and come with 128GB flash memory. The smaller model lasts nine hours on a single charge, whereas its bigger sibling offers battery life of up to 13 hours. The former has been priced at $999, whereas the latter costs $1,099.
Cook, who has seen Apple's stock fall 37% after it touched a high of $705 in September as competition in the key smartphone market escalated, began by describing the growth of Apple's app store.
The CEO told the audience of developers at the Moscone Center in San Francisco that its app store now has 9,00,000 apps, which have been downloaded a total of 50 billion times.
The conference, tickets to which sold out in just over a minute when it opened up in April, comes as South Korean rival Samsung Electronics has solidified its lead in the smartphone market with a 33% share followed by Apple with 18% during the first quarter, according to market research firm IDC.
Cook is under pressure to show that the company that created the smartphone and tablet markets is not slowing down as deep-pocketed competitors such as Samsung and Google encroach on its share. Investor concerns now center around whether Apple will be able to come up with more groundbreaking products as smartphone and tablet market gets more crowded.
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