New and Noteworthy: Earnings watch: Apple, IBM, Intel; The Apple Calendar Conundrum; more

Earnings watch: Apple, IBM, Intel CNN reports that analysts expect Apple's sales to jump 27 percent to $4.7 billion from the same period a year ago and earnings, on a per-share basis, to surge 33 percent to 50 cents a share. "Apple's back-to-school sales were healthy and lower component prices should boost the company's margins during the September quarter, Jonathan Hoopes, an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners, said. While iPod sales have cooled from their explosive growth rates, sales of Apple's Macintosh computers have been growing. 'The talk of town is what is Apple's share gain through the end of the year in terms of its desktop and notebook computers,' he said." More.

The Apple Calendar Conundrum BusinessWeek laments that there's no easy way to transfer addresses and other data from Mac to PC to handheld and back. "Why in all creation would an e-mail application like Outlook trigger memories of lyrics sung by the funk band War in 1975? Because that's also my plea to the various entities that build the software intended to organize my life: Why can't you make your various islands of data work in total harmony? Here's the nature of my problem: My daily calendar lives in Microsoft's (MSFT) Outlook as well as my Research In Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry. That much is straightforward. The BlackBerry is an Outlook user's best friend, and the compatibility between the two is legendary." More.

Take a Look Inside the G5-Based Dual-Processor Power Mac InformIT has published an excerpt from Amit Singh's "Mac OS X Internals" book exploring the architecture of Apple's Power Mac G5. "Amit Singh looks at the system architecture of a specific type of Apple computer: a G5-based dual-processor Power Mac. Moreover, he discusses a specific PowerPC processor used in these systems: the 970FX. He focuses on a G5-based system because the 970FX is more advanced, more powerful, and more interesting in general than its predecessors. It is also the basis for the first 64-bit dual-core PowerPC processor: the 970MP." More.

Previously on MacFixIt

• Mac OS X 10.4.8 (#11): Finder crashes, fixes; Closed-lid portable functions broken; more
• Microsoft Office 2004 11.3 (#3): Fixes for problems updating

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