During his quarterly financial results call, Apple’s chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer and Tim Cooke (COO) revealed that the company will make a key “product transition” that cuts back on its profit margins to help shut out rivals.

A frequent point of discussion during the hour-long call, the mystery transition will drop Apple’s gross margins from 34.8 percent in the spring quarter to just 31.5 percent in the July-to-September window in which the update takes place, ultimately settling at about 30 percent during Apple’s fiscal 2009.

Oppenheimer is deliberately short on details, not wanting to pre-announce the product or allude to its nature, but explains that cost will be a driving factor.

The new, unnamed product will continue to have “technologies and features that others can’t match,” according to the CFO.

So what does this mean? Obviously lower margin products are coming, but will they be entirely new products or lower prices on existing products? There’s a big chance Apple will introduce redesigned MacBooks and MacBook Pros at a lower price and slightly redesigned iPods.

Despite the best efforts of Apple and AT&T, it appears that the latest version of the iPhone has been unlocked via the same method as used on the original iPhone.

A Brazilian blog, TechGuru, posted the first report of it. Gizmodo checked it out, and said the method involves using a special SIM card adapter. It tricks the phone into thinking it’s on an approved network.

MobileMe is Apple’s new Internet service for Mac, iPhone, iPod touch, and PC that takes the best of .Mac and adds many new features. With MobileMe you will continue to get services that take advantage of Mac integration such as iDisk, and photo sharing from iPhoto ’08. You also get a suite of new web applications at me.com; email, contacts, and calendar; and 20 GB of online storage.

If you are a .Mac subscriber, Apple appears to have activated the corresponding @me.com email addresses. If your email address was username@mac.com previously, you can now use username@me.com and emails should arrive in your .Mac mailbox. In the near future, Apple will be migrating all the email services over to Me.com, but users will be able to keep their @mac.com email addresses:

Apple has also published Frequently Asked Questions about the .Mac to MobileMe transition.

The @me.com transition is part of Apple’s shift to MobileMe, a new web-based service that offers “desktop class” email, calendar and address book functionality. MobileMe is set to officially launch in early July.

Apple is close to announcing it has signed a deal to sell HBO programs and movies on the iTunes website, according to HBO employees involved in executing the agreement.

HBO will begin selling some of its most popular television series on Apple’s iTunes Store, the companies announced on Tuesday.

HBO will offer The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood and Rome, as well as Flight of the Conchords and The Wire.

The deal marks the first time that Apple has agreed to a separate price structure for a content provider, one of the employees said. NBC pulled its programming from iTunes last summer after Apple refused to charge more than $1.99 for that network’s shows. In May, NBC struck a deal with Microsoft to sell its shows on the Zune website.

From mow on, NBC is the only major channel currently not offering its shows through iTunes. The store currently carries 800 different shows and has sold more than 150 million episodes.
The iTunes store isn’t a big cash cow for Apple, making up less than 10% of Apple’s $24 billion in sales last year, but is a big driver of iPod and Macintosh computer sales.

Apple released Apple TV Software 2.0.2 Monday, an update that, from all appearances, delivered nothing more than a collection of unenumerated bug-fixes to Apple’s set-top box. As with the previous 2.0.1 update, this update was released with little fanfare.

Those with Apple TVs can download and install the update by choosing Update Software from the General screen within the Settings entry. Over a 3Mbps DSL broadband connection it takes about 10 minutes to download the update. Installation (which, as before, can be performed at a time of the user’s choosing) took another three or four minutes.

Worldwide sales of mobile phones surpassed 1.15 billion units in 2007, according to market research firm Gartner. The company also said that three new companies entered the top ten in sales for the first time including Apple with its iPhone.

Apple was joined in the top ten by ZTE and Research in Motion with its popular BlackBerry device.

Nokia is leading the way in mobile phone sales with a 37.8 percent market share, followed by Motorola (14.3 percent), Samsung (13.4 percent), Sony Ericsson (8.8 percent) and LG (6.8 percent). Total worldwide phone sales increased by 16 percent from 2006, according to Gartner.

Apple introduced the iPhone last June and has sold over 4 million units since including 2.3 million units in the last quarter alone.

We don’t usually cover Wordpress themes but we make an exception for two nice Apple related themes. The first is the Retro MacOS Wordpress Theme. Any old Mac user will like it. The second, more modern theme is the iTheme Wordpress Theme.

Wordpress, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is a very successful blogging engine which allows users to apply various themes to change the look of their blogs.

This week Apple confirmed that its long running rival productivity suite ‘AppleWorks’ has finally been put out to pasture. AppleWorks has been around some 23 years, beginning life as ClarisWorks before being taken over by Apple and renamed AppleWorks. AppleWorks was a great tool, and at one point it was the industry’s best-selling piece of software, beating even Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC.

AppleWorks was updated for Mac OS X and given a presentation maker, but it never received a Universal binary facelift after Apple moved its machines to Intel processor. In 2005, AppleWorks was shoved into the deep shadows as iWork debuted. AppleWorks had not been updated in three years and the news comes just nine days after Apple announced its successor iWork ‘08.

Apple has instantly removed all trace of AppleWorks from its site and redirected all AppleWorks queries to its new iWork suite and a search for AppleWorks returns iWork as the top hit. While AppleWorks does still come up on some of Apple’s foreign language stores, it seems safe to declare the suite terminated.

Although iWork is faster and more robust than AppleWorks, there doesn’t appear to be any upgrade discounts on iWork for existing AppleWorks customers, which is too bad.

Apple beats Microsoft at their own game by providing support for Open XML in iWork ‘08, something Office for Mac doesn’t have. Analyst Gregg Keizer says Apple are embarrassing it’s rival with the new office suite.Indeed it’s embarrassing for Microsoft since they, on top of this, recently delayed the release of their new Office suite until early 2008. And it’s funny that even a manager at Microsoft praised the new iWork:

“[iWork ‘08] reads the Office Open XML files with very high fidelity.”
Brian Jones, Program Manager, Microsoft