Apple WWDC 2011

I’ve attended the Apple WWDC (opens in a new window) for the past 4 years and it’s been nothing short of exciting each year. This year, event sold out in 10 hours and so I am fortunate to have a spot. In contrast to last year, the event sold out in approxiately 14 days. Steve Jobs delivered a very interesting keynote speech (opens in a new window) with features that in my opinion ensure Apple will continue to stay a few years ahead of all other mobile companies. It’s amazing to think how far we’ve come since my first 4 Macs, which were the Apple II (opens in a new window) , IIc (opens in a new window) , IIe (opens in a new window) , and IIGS (opens in a new window) . Ahhh…and let us not forget other microcomputers such as the Amiga (opens in a new window) , Commodore 64 (opens in a new window) , and the earlier TRS-80 (opens in a new window) (also known as the “trash 80″). The TRS-80 was in fact technically my first personal computer.

Here are a few very interesting statistics at the time of this writing:

• There are over 225 million iOS devices worldwide.
• Apple represents a 48% share of the tablet and mobile market.
• 25 million iPads have been sold to date.
• There are 425,000 applications in the App Store with 90,000 of those applications specifically designed to run on the iPad.
• The App Store has enjoyed over 14 billion downloads
• Apple has 225 million credit card accounts.
• Apple has shipped 54 million Macs and growing, which is a 28% growth over last year. To contrast this, PC growth is at a negative 1% growth over the same year.
• 73% of the Macs shipped today are notebooks

These statistics are astounding. I am of course not at liberty to discuss any information not made public by Apple regarding the upcoming technologies but it is sufficed to say Mac OS X Lion + iCloud (opens in a new window) + iOS 5 (opens in a new window) represents another leap in market share for Apple and a set of very useful features for consumers.