Per tradition, John Siracusa delivers one of the most in depth reviews of major Mac OS X updates. This year, he takes a look at Mountain Lion, the ninth major release of Apple’s desktop operating system. If you want to know everything possible about the update, look no further.

How big is his review? 25,935 words, including 167 images.

How can you get it?

• Read it online across 24 pages
• Kindle ebook ($4.99)
• Subscribe to Ars Technica for one month ($5) and get the following:
  • Read it on a single, ad-free web page
  • Download an iBooks-compatible ePub
  • Download a Kindle ebook
  • Download a PDF
• Save the link in something like Instapaper and read it on a single page.

Happy reading!

Today, Apple released financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2012. The results are a good follow-up to the second quarter of 2012.

The Numbers

• Revenue was $35.0 billion, an increase of 22% year-over-year
• Profit was $8.8 billion, an increase of 21% year-over-year
• Earnings per share were $9.32, an increase of 20% year-over-year
• Cash flow was increased by $7 billion
• Gross margin was 42.8%, up from 41.7% year-over-year

iPhone

Apple sold 26.0 million iPhones, representing an increase of 28% year-over-year. The iPhone accounted for $16.2 billion in revenue - an increase of 22% year-over-year - and comprised 46% of the total quarterly revenue. These are pretty solid results given the rampant rumors of the next-generation iPhone.

iPad

Apple sold a record 17 million iPads in the quarter, an increase of 84% year-over-year. The iPad accounted for $9.1 billion in revenue - an increase of 50% year-over-year - and comprised 26% of the quarterly revenue. Not bad for a device that is supposedly consumption-only.

iPod

The iPod again saw declining sales. Year-over-year sales dropped 12% to 6.8 million units, with iPod touch comprising around 2 million.¹ Despite the decline, Apple still claims a 70% market share in music players.

Mac

Apple sold 4 millions Macs - 1.2 million desktops and 2.8 million laptops - representing a tepid 1.8% year-over-year increase. Despite the marginal growth, sales still represent a record for the June quarter. This is the 25th consecutive quarter that Apple has outpaced the PC market.

Apple TV

The Apple TV saw sales of 1.3 million units. For perspective on those numbers, the Apple TV just outsold the XBox 360. Not bad for a product still described as a “hobby.”

Take-aways

In this transition quarter, Apple still beat last year’s numbers by a healthy percentage. The iPad is dominating the tablet market and just sold a record number of units. The iPhone also remained strong. Apple has now sold over 410 million iOS devices - devices that now have access to over 650,000 apps. Even the Apple TV saw strong sales.

Looking forward, Apple will release Mountain Lion tomorrow, the updated MacBook line will have a full quarter of sales to drive Mac growth, there will be a new iPhone later this year, and potentially a new 8" iPad. Things are looking good in Cupertino for another solid quarter of sales over the next three months.

If, like me, you are a fan of Christopher Nolan’s vision of the Batman saga, you will enjoy this profile written by Joseph Bevan at the British Film Institute:

Nolan’s cinema is driven by a need to entertain the frustrated innocent – the person who first loved movies, comics, books and games in their youth – and to help them transcend the limitations of ordinary existence, of adulthood. Whatever the implications of such high-functioning escapism, Nolan has yet to dishonour his pact with his fans. As Angier puts it at the end of The Prestige: “The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder. Then you get to see something really special… It was the look on their faces.”

iOS developer, David Barnard, on “look and feel” copyright infringement:

If “look and feel” were to be broadly interpreted by the courts, it would stifle software development in ways similar to the current software patent mess. But I’d argue that a strict interpretation, very carefully applied, is good for the software industry in that it discourages blatant rippoffs and encourages developers to do their own damn work.

I agree with David. There is a big distinction between modeling your algorithm after someone else’s and blatantly ripping off the entire package.

Ryan Jones presents an interesting look at the iPad’s pricing umbrella and why it points to a new 7.85"-inch model.

He notes that Apple has used three main options to fill such an umbrella in the past - retain old hardware at lower cost, find partners to subsidize the hardware, or build a new device. Where does that leave Apple with the iPad?

They’ve already used the older hardware strategy, so the remaining two strategies are 1) get subsidies or 2) create a new product line.

My bet - new iPad.

Jason Kottke presents Walter Cronkite’s original CBS coverage of the moon landing.

UC Irvine released findings from a study that investigated the effects of email in the workplace:

People who read email changed screens twice as often and were in a steady “high alert” state, with more constant heart rates. Those removed from email for five days experienced more natural, variable heart rates.

I hate email. HATE. I agree with Shawn Blanc’s take:

My personal theory on this is that the mental stress of “always being reachable” or “always anticipating the incoming” hinders your mind from being able to settle into a focused state of concentration.

I recently turned off notifications on my phone in favor of checking everything manually. My focus improved and my stress level decreased. As Blanc mentions, I no longer anticipated the buzz of my phone or felt phantom vibrations in the form of muscle fasciculations.

However, I haven’t done this on my work machine. I find that I am increasingly pissed with every ding of a new email. I think given the success of my phone techniques and the findings of this study, I am going to turn off push email at work in favor of manual fetching.

Senator Charles Schumer, in an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal:

If publishers, authors and consumers are at the mercy of a single retailer that controls 90% of the market and can set rock-bottom prices, we will all suffer. Choice is critical in any market, but that is particularly true in cultural markets like books. The prospect that a single firm would control access to books should give any reader pause.

The Justice Department lawsuit is also unsettling from a broader perspective. As our economy transitions to digital platforms, we should be celebrating and supporting industries that find ways to adapt and grow. By developing a pricing model that made e-book sales work for them, publishers did just that.

If you remember, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in April against Apple and publishers for pricing collusion. But as Scott Turow noted, Amazon was already practicing an anti-competitive model:

The irony bites hard: our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition.

Let’s hope that the Department of Justice heeds Senator Schumer’s apt advice.

Jon Mitchell, ReadWriteWeb, on a brand new web news site - Evening Edition:

A Web design studio built the first news site I’ve ever read from top to bottom two days in a row, and it did so as a side project. Mule Design is not in the journalism business. It builds sites to solve all manner of client communication problems. But it did in a week’s work what news organizations can’t seem to do at all: deliver their output in a form that’s comfortable and convenient for the audience. I couldn’t help myself. I had to figure out how and why.

Here’s why the site is great. An actual editor finds the day’s most important news, writes about why it matters, and publishes it at 5 p.m. every day without any notifications or streams. The site is clean, responsive, and isn’t beholden to nostalgic design traps - like ads and skeuomorphic print layouts. This all means that you can read the news that matters most without battling through a slew of crappy advertisements or sifting through stories about Justin Bieber’s hair. The designers are first to tell you that the experiment is just beginning, but I certainly like the start.

Jason Davies:

For each natural number n, we draw a periodic curve starting from the origin, intersecting the x-axis at n and its multiples. The prime numbers are those that have been intersected by only two curves: the prime number itself and one.

I love numbers.

(via: Rands)