AAPL Rises With Markets
Stocks are rallying despite the depressed housing market and Greek bank merger news. Shares of AAPL are up with a strong tech tape. Catalysts include the next
iPhone launch this fall (see below); the
iPad 3 in the spring of 2012; continued adoption in China and other emerging markets;
iCloud /
iOS 5 rollout and adoption; the continued evolution and next generation of
Apple TV; and new platforms such as books / publishing and social (
Ping). Shares of
Apple trade at
9.7x Enterprise Value / Trailing Twelve Months Free Cash Flow (including long-term marketable securities).
Carriers Looking To Diversify From Apple And Android (BGR) Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu believes that carriers are relaying a desire to broaden their portfolios to include a viable alternative to Google’s
Android OS and Apple’s
iOS platform, which now dominate the smartphone market. In a note to investors regarding
Research In Motion, he talked with carriers who "are increasingly concerned with the growing dominance of GOOG and AAPL and want a viable No. 3 alternative."
Windows (
Nokia) and RIM have that chance.
Read » Amazon Android Tablet To Undercut iPad Pricing
(The New York Post) Amazon’s upcoming Android tablet will soon launch for “hundreds less” than Apple’s entry-level
iPad 2 tablet, according an anonymous source.
Amazon will launch its first Android tablet in September or October and aggressive pricing is seen as crucial to Amazon’s success in the space. Amazon’s tablet offerings will reportedly feature the Android operating system, along with deep integration of several
Amazon services such as the
Amazon Appstore, the
Kindle eBook store, Amazon’s Cloud Drive service and others.
Read » Tim Cook Gets 1 Million (More) Reasons To Stay At Apple (Business Insider) Apple has awarded new CEO
Tim Cook 1 million shares of stock. Half the stock will vest in five years, another half in ten years on August 24, 2021. The award was disclosed in an
SEC filing and the long vesting period shows that both parties are in this for the long haul. Cook is not interim anything. He's the CEO of Apple. At today's prices, those shares are worth ~$390 million. And if the stock does what it did under
Steve Jobs the last ten years, they will be work $15 billion when all his shares vest.
Read » Apple Kills TV Show Rentals In iTunes (All Things Digital) Now you have to buy them. Apple has removed the ability to rent TV shows from both
iTunes and its
Apple TV, taking away what was just last year one of the major advertised selling points of the $99 streaming-centric set-top box.Very few TV studios were on board with the idea in the first place-only Fox and
ABC, so it's not an unexpected move. Not only that, but
consumers haven't been especially interested in television rentals.
Read » Another Day, Another iPhone 5 Rumor (Digitimes) A leak from Apple's Swiss website indicates that the
iPhone 5's screen will be smaller than the rumored 4.2 inches. The rumored specifications of
iPhone 5 include a 4- to 4.2-inch HD touch panel, 8-megapixel camera, full HD video recording, A5 dual-core processor and new ultra-thin industrial design. Sources believe that the leaked specifications are more the market's expectations for iPhone 5. The iPhone 5 will not have many differences compared to iPhone 4 in terms of components and the panel will still be less than 4-inch.
Click to see all the iPhone 5 rumors.
Read » Apple Wins Speedy Trial Date Against Samsung (FOSS Patents) A California court granted Apple's request for an expedited trial start in its patent infringement suit against
Samsung, though the trial's July 30, 2012 start date is not as early as the iPhone maker had hoped. This gives
Samsung less time to prepare its defense. Most lawsuits of similar complexity usually take nearly two years to get to trial. The ongoing legal battle between Apple and Samsung has seen preliminary injunctions granted on the Samsung Galaxy line of mobile devices across Europe.
Read » No A6 Chip Until The Next iPad Launch In 2012 (CNet) The first generation
iPad was built on the A4 processor, and then the iPad 2 got upgraded to the A5. It's expected that Apple will include the A5 in the iPhone 5 this fall, so sights have been set on the A6 chip for 2012. Sources say the chip will enter production in the second quarter next year at the earliest. Given that April is the beginning of the second quarter, the company could sneak the A6 in with its next yearly iPad update.
Read » Buccaneers Switch Playbooks For iPads (St. Petersburg Times) The
Tampa Bay Buccaneers have distributed a fresh batch of iPad 2s to all 90 players as part of a new initiative from coach Raheem Morris. Because of the lockout, Morris watched a lot of video so had the idea to download playbooks. With the tablets, the Bucs can spend their free time reviewing their downloaded plays, while analyzing video footage from practices, games and opposing teams.
Read » Jobs' Contribution Goes Further Than Apple Gadgets (Yahoo) Here's the real genius of Steve Jobs. In the past decade, Apple morphed from a struggling niche personal computer maker into a global mass-affluent gadget brand. As it did so, Apple didn't just create wealth for investors who had the foresight to buy the stock when it was in the double digits. Rather, Jobs' genius, and his great contribution, was to create platforms, devices and economic ecosystems on which other businesses and industries could create new economic arrangements. Ecosystems that offered a lifeline to struggling established industries as well as immense opportunities for upstart entrepreneurs.
Read » Apple Co-Founders Reminisce (Bloomberg) Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, co-founders of Apple along with
Steve Jobs, talk with Emily Chang about the creation of the company and Jobs. Wozniak said that "Apple is full of some incredible people, and Steve would not leave this company not feeling it has got a good push for right now to keep the ways of thinking that lead to the great products that Steve has employed."
Read » 
