This is an update to the last sales statistics post to include Apple’s Q2 and Q3 2012 results as well as adding Macintosh sales:
Apple Device Sales, accumulated (Q1/2007 - Q3/2012). Y Axis is in millions.
I got the Mac sales numbers from Apple’s quarterly Earnings Press Releases dating back to Q1/2007. Nearly all Macs sold from 2007 onwards are capable of running at least OS X 10.7 (Lion). The Mac numbers include both desktop (iMac, Mac mini, Mac Pro) and portable (MacBook series) machines.
This puts things in perspective from sheer numbers. There are now more iPads in the world than there are (relatively up-to-date) Macs!
On the other hand, given that most Macs cost over $1,000 the sales numbers aren’t reflecting revenue. But you can argue that making a Mac OS X (Mountain) Lion app has the potential to reach the same number of App Store users than an iPad exclusive app.
Right now I’m trying to freshen up what little I know of OpenGL ES 1.1 so I’m up to speed with OpenGL ES 2.0. I keep using the old ES 1.1 functions, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to re-learn OpenGL ES 2.0 from the ground up.
This OpenGL ES 2.0 Primer is helpful if you want to gain an understanding what’s different (and cool) about OpenGL ES 2.0 when compared to 1.1. It won’t teach you how to use OpenGL ES 2.0 though. The High-End 3D Graphics with OpenGL ES 2.0 PDF covers the concepts in greater detail, and quickly runs you through all important processes from initialization to compiling shaders to shutting down OpenGL ES 2.0. Again I didn’t learn how to program but it helped me understand the GL ES 2.0 concepts.
But what I really wanted was to learn how to do things with OpenGL in the context of cocos2d. Which means I just need to draw stuff, I don’t need to know how to load textures and setup the viewport and things like that. Nevertheless, Ray Wenderlich has done a great job explaining how to create a OpenGL ES 2.0 iPhone project from scratch. And Jeff LaMarche covered ES 2.0 shaders in great detail. Continue reading »
