Apple Inc cut the price on the base version of its 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop with “retina” display by $200 as it revamps its top-end laptops, weeks after the company reported a steep decline in Mac sales in the holiday quarter.
Investors have worried that Apple’s iPad is cannibalizing its Mac range, but Chief Executive Tim Cook has brushed aside these concerns.
The company sold 4.1 million Macs in the December quarter, down 21 percent from a year earlier.
At its gleaming store, RadanMac offers the latest Apple gear - the new iPad, iPhones, iPods, laptops, all-in-one desktop computers and more.
But this is no ordinary Apple store. It’s in Tehran, where Apple and other U.S. computer products are banned under U.S. sanctions that have been in place for years.
Despite the embargo, RadanMac is one of an estimated 100 stores in the Iranian capital that openly sell Apple products, often at little more than U.S. prices.
“Business has been booming for the last three years,” said Majid Tavassoli, the store’s owner, in a phone interview. He said his company employs more than 20 staffers and has been supplying Apple products to Iranian buyers since 1995.
The company also has a servicing unit and a business sales arm whose clients have included the Central Bank of Iran, state television channels, newspapers and design professionals.
Apple Inc took the wraps off its own mobile mapping service and made its enhanced Siri voice-search available for iPads as it rolled out souped-up software and hardware on Monday to help it wage war on Google Inc.
CEO Tim Cook, who took over from late co-founder Steve Jobs last August, spearheaded the unveiling of new services — such as in-house mapping and beefed-up Siri software — to help keep at bay Google and its fast-growing Android mobile platform.
Its new mobile operating software — the iOS6 — comes with a mapping system “built from the ground up,” said software chief Scott Forstall, sidelining the Google map service that the Internet giant has invested heavily in.
Apple’s map service comes with three-dimensional images of cities called “Flyover” along with real-time traffic updates and turn-by-turn navigation.
