Apple has notified iPhone developers their submissions to the App Store must be compatible with iPhone OS 3.0 or they will no longer be reviewed, according to an iPhone Developer Program email.
Existing apps in the App Store should already run on iPhone OS 3.0 without modification, but Apple advised developers to test existing apps with iPhone OS 3.0 to ensure the absence of compatibility issues. “After iPhone OS 3.0 becomes available to customers, any app that is incompatible with iPhone OS 3.0 may be removed from the App Store,” the email read.
iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5 and iPhone SDK 3.0 beta 5 are currently posted in the iPhone Dev Center, which means major hoopla in iPhone-world is likely mere weeks away.
Apple moved quickly to remove an embarrassing listing on the iPhone web app directory which promoted the notorious QuickPWN software, which jailbreaks iPhones and iPod touches to allow unfettered application installation. Apple removed it tonight around 11 p.m. after coverage around the Mac blogosphere, including here at CoM. The link still comes up on Google, but the page is blank.
Why does this snafu matter? Because this little slip-up is yet another sign that Apple is completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content it needs to curate these days: Music, TV, Movies, and Podcasts in the iTunes Store; thousands upon thousands of apps for iPhone and many more that never make the cut; and an equally huge collection of web apps for iPhone on the website.
In a lot of ways, Apple has become one of the world’s biggest content gatekeepers. And the approval of Baby Shaker and the rejection of the Nine Inch Nails app are pretty clear evidence that the company still has a lot of work ahead to grow into the role.
Kyle Buckner is a very talented fellow and his primary muse is Apple.
We’ve featured some of Buckner’s work before and he’s also got a spread in the June issue of Mac|Life magazine. He may well be one of the hottest Apple-inspired artists in the US right now.
Buckner sent us photos of his most recent school project, in which he was tasked to create a “Bookart”. Apple obsessed as he is, he was inspired to create a scale model of a MacBook.
Buckner constructed the casing out of wood, routering all the corners and then priming, sanding and painting the pieces white. The hinge system replicates the real Mac’s and is fully constructed out of hand cut MDF wood.
After he painted the pieces, he used a pencil to add the fine details. He drew the screen and full keyboard and penciled in every tiny phillips head screw at its location.
His piece is 3/4 the size of an original MacBook.
We apologize to anyone who got too excited by our earlier post teasing that this might be Apple’s new netbook. It’s a Monday night. It’s not football season.
Yesterday’s news that the Federal Trade Commission was investigating whether occasional collaborations between Apple and Google constitute anti-competitive practices is all the rage this morning. Apparently, a 1914 law makes it illegal for a person to sit on the boards of two companies if it will reduce competition between them. Apple and Google share two directors between their boards — so the only question is whether their presence has reduced competition.
And honestly, the answer is not at all. If anything, having Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the Apple board has made it more awkward as Android has started to diffuse into the market. Even though Google’s apps for the iPhone are among the best on the device, the proliferation of iPhone competitors from Le Goog is setting up for a head-on collision between Mountain View and Cupertino.
According to experts, even if anti-trust violations were determined, the likely upshot would just be for the directors to step down from one of their two boards. No biggie. But the case highlights that American business law doesn’t really understand Silicon Valley. Out here, it’s only natural that you would simultaneously compete and collaborate. You share secrets and then try to use them against each other. It’s in the DNA here. But the law, as they, is blind.
A vocal cadre of iPhone app developers is none too pleased with the treatment they receive from Apple and may be considering a suit for breach of contract, according to a report at TechCrunch.
Examples of complaints on developer forums indicate that some developers remain unpaid for sales of their products on the App Store dating back to last fall and the report cites email exchanges between at least one developer and and the finance department at Apple in which the developer is informed his complaints about not being paid “border on harassment.”
Whether any actual lawsuits are in the offing is purely speculative at this point, but the discord is curious in the light of Apple’s recent recession-beating revenue performance and the stunning, widely publicized success of the App Store.
About a week ago, MacFormat posted a partial image of a mysterious Apple device “without comment”, saying it had been submitted anonymously by email.
It was just a tease, though, as MacFormat Illustrator Adam Benton had submitted via email his case for what you see here, a full-fledged Apple Media Pad, Cupertino’s answer to the world of netbooks.
In Benton’s conception, “Your entire Home folder – all docs, photos, movies and music – would live ‘in the cloud’ on Apple’s servers. Regularly used files would be cached locally, but the system would enable you to keep files in sync between the tablet and your desktop Macs, whilst getting away with a smaller SSD.”
Benton’s idea calls for a that dock would support USB and FireWire, plus Mini DisplayPort, and Bluetooth to be used for peripherals like headsets and keyboards. The OS would be the iPhone and iPod touch OS, scaled up to support the larger display, with integrated 3G connectivity – proper 7.2Mb/sec HSUPA – to keep users connected to Apple’s servers at all times.
When Apple bought chip design firm PA Semiconductor a year ago, it sparked all kinds of speculation about what the acquisition might bring to the Cupertino Kingpins. Was Apple abandoning Intel hardware in Macs to make totally proprietary systems? Did they just need engineering talent. The answer, not-too-surprisingly, had nothing to do with Macs, and everything to do with the iPod and iPhone universe.
As Steve Jobs told the New York Times last June, “”PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods.”
Now, Apple is spending a lot more on chip design talent. Bringing in a very senior executive from IBM and two CTOs from AMD. The Wall Street Journal even reports that Apple has new job listings that include duties like “testing the functional correctness of Apple developed silicon.”
Again, this is all almost certainly device, not Mac-related. The more Apple can up the power and reduce the power consumption of the iPhone and iPod touch, the stronger the platform the company can build, and the more we can do with them. The Journal also claims Apple wants to use technology its competitors can’t get access to, which would be a big throwback to the 1980s, if true. I think it’s far more likely that Apple believes it has the talent to make a chip that delivers world-beating performance in an affordable package at minimal power use, which is way more important than specific features built into silicon.
In all likelihood, we’re talking about the iPhone generation due in 2010 at the earliest, though it would be a lovely surprise for the 2009 edition. What do you think? Do you want to get Samsung out of your iPhone’s CPU?
Chalk up one more exhibit for the case that Apple and its ecosystem refuse to participate in the global economic meltdown.
WWDC sold out Tuesday, the earliest date on record for which the annual conference devoted to Apple’s development community has reached capacity. Tickets went on sale just a month ago, and were no bargain — even the early-bird special was well over $1,000.
Interest in this year’s event is great for a number of reasons. Developers and presumably the audience at the keynote will get the first public glimpse of OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” The new OS has been in testing with developers for a while now, but many of the expected user interface changes remain under wraps. WWDC may be the first time anyone gets a real look at those.
Even bigger than Snow Leopard, however is the possibility that Apple could unveil a new version of the iPhone, even a touchscreen netbook or tablet. The rumor mill on all of these ideas has been active for months.
And of course there is the ever present shadow of Steve Jobs. Will he make an appearance, even tough he’s not scheduled to return from his sabbatical until the end of June? Could he possibly bear – health permitting – to let someone else introduce a major OS upgrade and potentially game-changing hardware?
The Jobs factor aside, the real takeaway from WWDC’s full house next month is the clear evidence that interest in Apple’s technology remains very strong. The idea that someone could found a career or hit the jackpot on the strength of learning how to develop applications that work with Apple technology seems to be one of the few – and one of the brightest – lights of hope on the economic horizon.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of viewing “Art & Copy,” a new documentary about the best ad agencies on the planet, during the San Francisco Film Festival. It’s a wonderful film, full of great stories about the creative process and the origins of the 20th Century’s most memorable ads. Critically for Mac fans, this includes a brilliant blow-by-blow for how Apple’s amazing “1984” commercial was created, courtesy of TBWA Chiat-Day Chairman Lee Clow.
The clip itself isn’t available to embed, but what Clow says about “1984” — and then demonstrates in 1997’s “Think Different” — is worth remarking upon for anyone who has a long-term relationship with Apple. Clow says that the reason “1984” could be brilliant is that, first of all, he was given absolute creative freedom, second, Ridley Scott typified a new way of making movies that was just starting to take off in the U.S., and, most important, Apple actually had a revolutionary product and was aware of how revolutionary it was. When a great creative force gets a near-unlimited budget to promote a genuinely amazing product, it would be hard not to do so well.
Fascinatingly, Clow claims Apple’s board tried to kill “1984” right before it aired, at which point Jobs and Woz offered to split the cost of airing it in the Super Bowl — so it helps to have rich, passionate executives, too.
What’s interesting about looking back to “1984” and “Think Different,” both of which are considered in the film, is just how emotional they are. They make a profound appeal to people who feel like outsiders, rebels. Whether Apple ever really represented that feeling or not (I personally believe that it did), those spots went an incredible distance toward summing up what being a Mac user meant in the pre-iMac era. It meant everything, in a lot of ways. Pretty much any long-time Apple user will get misty watching either spot — or even talking about them.
That’s why the segment of the movie that shows Clow and his team working on iPod dance commercials in the present day was ultimately such a shock. Apple doesn’t make passionate ads any more. The emotion is gone. Apple makes cool ads — iPod dancers, Mac v. PC — and it makes educational ads — iPhone explanations, iPod touch as gaming system — but it no longer makes a real emotional appeal. Now, this transition is unquestionably more successful. But it does make me feel less a part of a movement. And that’s something I miss pretty much all the time.
I can’t recommend this film, which gets distributed in September, highly enough — nor that you click through the jump to watch “1984” and “Think Different.”
TUAW has the scoop on a very curious entry in the stats for Adium: a single user machine identified as the “MacBook Mini”. Now, this could easily be spoofed — last I checked the “Lenovo reModelFaMacBookAir” was not a computer — but on the other hand, it might be the very first appearance of the long-rumored Mac netbook.
After all, the very first place the name MacBook Air appeared was in the very same Adium stats. Only Apple knows what Apple is working on. But for now — we can dream.
“Dept. of deja vu: MacBookMini found in Adium stats” TUAW
Apple may begin offering a CDMA version of the iPhone branded to Verizon sometime in 2010, according to a report at USA Today.
Citing apocryphal “people familiar with the situation,” the report claims Verizon began talks with Apple prior to Steve Jobs’ health sabbatical and says conversations have continued in the ensuing months. The report comes in the wake of news reported earlier in the month regarding AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson’s efforts to extend his company’s exclusive US iPhone distribution deal through 2011.
Sunday’s USA Today story also flies in the face of recent comments made by Tim Cook, Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, who has been in charge of the company’s day-to-day operations in Jobs’ absence.
Speaking last week during Apple’s quarterly earnings call, Cook dismissed the idea of producing a CDMA version of the iPhone, asserting that it has no future, because many CDMA carriers plan to adopt the same 4G standard that will soon be used on GSM networks.
Whether Verizon is successful in closing a deal with Apple for 2010 or not, it only stands to reason, especially in the light of how the iPhone saved AT&T’s financial bacon in 2008, that iPhone’s luster continues to grow.
Every rumor like the one trumpeted Sunday by USA Today serves to increase anticipation for a certain (thus far unannounced) Tuesday event in June or July at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.
Apple lost a patent infringement lawsuit Thursday in Texas, when a jury awarded Opti Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif $19 million in damages. The plaintiffs argued Apple willfully infringed on Opti Inc.’s patent covering a computer operation that enables a “snooping” function designed to help computers more easily retrieve previously accessed data.
The jury in the courtroom of Judge Charles “Chad” Everingham IV of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Marshall, rejected Apple’s contention that Opti Inc.’s patent should be declared invalid and awarded the verdict as fair and reasonable compensation to Opti for Apple’s willful patent violation, according to the verdict form.
No word a yet on the status of Apple’s intent to appeal the verdict in the case.
Were you aware there is an annual conference devoted to the Apple II computer? And that it’s been held for 20 years?
Make plans now to be at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, MO from July 21 – 26 for, yes, the 20th annual KansasFest, a computer hoedown all about Apple’s iconic Apple II computer.
The keynote speaker will be Jason Scott, webmaster of
TEXTFILES.COM, director of “BBS: The Documentary”, and caretaker of Sockington, the cat on Twitter with over 300,000 followers.
KansasFest 2009, the world’s only annual Apple II conference, invites any and all Apple II and Macintosh users, fans, and friends to attend what oganizers call the “summer camp for geeks.” For photos, schedules, presentations from past year’s events, and inquiries, visit the event’s Web site.
It took two days of people complaining, but Apple finally yanked Baby Shaker from the App Store on Wednesday – though the screaming and crying over why it was ever approved in the first place has probably yet to reach a fever pitch.
With nearly umpty-thousand applications now in the App Store and Apple fast approaching a billion downloads, it’s not unreasonable to expect that some things might slip through the cracks.
But, seriously, Baby Shaker?
Think I could slip my Shoot the President app past ’em somehow?
In a gloves-off analysis of Apple’s unexpectedly good earnings report yesterday ($1.2 billion in profits, up 20 percent from 2008), Time attributes the uptick to brand cachet, not the products.
“Apple and RIMM results are an example of why brands matter and why companies are willing to work to develop them by making huge investments which can stretch over decades.”
Writer Douglas McIntyre falls back on a number of generalizations “a lot of people” “a lot of experts” “a lot like the iPhone” “a lot of cheap phones” and then pulls a few punches took a few cheap shots at people who buy Apple products.
“A lot of people think that consumers who buy brand are suckers, the kind people WC Field used to mock in old movies. Samsung builds a smartphone that looks and works a lot like the iPhone. It is called the Instinct and Apple owners think it is junk.”
“A lot of experts claim to know why people buy branded products, but there are probably as many reasons as there are people. All Apple cares about is that their customers have enough money to buy an iPhone, iPod, or Mac. Suckers have money, too.”
Regardless of how much Steve Ballmer is cackling about Apple’s problems from charging a premium, the company’s performance suggests that the House That Steve Built is extremely well-adapted to thriving in the current recession.
Over the past three months, Apple enjoyed its best-ever non-holiday quarter. $8.16 billion in revenue, up 9 percent from last year. Profits of $1.2 billion, up 20 percent from a year ago. Apple beat consensus estimates by about 24 cents per share.
Mac sales did slow down a bit, but iPod sales were up 3 percent and iPhone sales an astounding 123 percent. The company is delivering results like no one else right now. The fact that the analysts were so pessimistic (they predicted a drop in revenue and profit) should elevate the price further.
Remember — this is the first quarter without Steve Jobs in charge since his cancer treatments five years ago, and Apple did better than ever before. And we’re six to ten weeks from a new version of the iPhone. Apple is sitting pretty, and no one can touch them right now.
The near-term economic horizon appears to be surprisingly bright in the Apple/Mac universe, according to a survey released Tuesday by MacTech Magazine.
Despite recent dismal numbers from many sectors of the economy, 90% of respondents in “the Apple market ecosystem” polled by surveyors from MacTech believe 2009 will be “almost as good as or better than 2008”; 62.8% reported feeling good or great when asked about the Apple/Mac segment.
“The MacTech team decided to survey those in the market after seeing two significant trends starkly contrasting the general U.S. economic news,” said Neil Ticktin, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher, MacTech Magazine. “It’s been easy to get wrapped up in the bad news of the U.S. economy, but the reality is that for the Mac and Apple markets, things are strong and expected to get stronger.”
MacTech’s own advertising results and forecasts appear to support Ticktin’s optimism, with the magazine seeing a 13% increase in ad revenues 1Q09 over 1Q08.
A news editor from another well-known technology-focused magazine told Cult of Mac Tuesday, “after an abysmal holiday season, ad sales for the June issue look to be the best EVER!” MacTech’s Ticktin added “our staff has heard from many MacTech advertisers how well they are doing despite the economy.”
The sunny outlook from Apple-land certainly contrasts with anecdotal sentiment Cult of Mac gathered Tuesday night at an AdTech after-party in San Francisco, where several attendees reported a very down-beat vibe from the bellwether digital advertising conference.
Yahoo also reported Tuesday plans to cut 5% of its workforce in the wake of a nearly 80% drop in profits in the first quarter of 2009, and media guru Shelley Palmer said at the post-AdTech gathering in San Francisco he gives the economy 10 months to show its hand as far worse than anyone believes it is today.
If you’ve ever wondered why some developers can’t stand Apple, perhaps Marco Arment can help.
Arment makes useful websites in New York, according to his bio. He’s the lead developer of Tumblr, the Web 2.0 sharing sensation, and creator of the very popular iPhone application Instapaper, which allows users to save web pages on their devices for reading later.
Arment penned a revealing blog post Monday that serves to highlight the frustration even established developers must endure in navigating the uncharted, fickle waters of Apple’s approval process for third-party iPhone and iPod Touch applications.
After submitting an update to Instapaper that included the mobile phone icon shown in the screen capture above, Arment was informed his update could not be accepted because it ran afoul of SDK guidelines that prevent “use [of] the Apple Logo or any other Apple-owned graphic symbol, logo, or icon … except pursuant to an express written trademark license from Apple.”
A friend of Arment’s had designed the icon and offered it to him for use with Instapaper.
Arment concedes the App Store is “an amazing deal for independent developers” but laments the fact that “problems seem so arbitrary, avoidable, and developer-hostile.”
In the end, the frustrated developer must resolve to “make a different icon from scratch that doesn’t contain any depictions of any Apple products,” with Arment asking, “can I use arrows, or does that violate the arrow key on Apple’s keyboards?”
And the bottom line, something with which even Apple is undoubtedly familiar, is that a developer in Arment’s position is forced to resubmit, wait another 7 -14 days, hope to be accepted, and lose a few weeks of the increased sales that the new version will generate, all the while chalking it up to “another annoying cost of doing business on the App Store that [you] can’t do a thing about.”
Who knows when the happy moment will come, but when it does, Apple is ready to trumpet the news that a billion apps have been downloaded from the iTunes AppStore.
So says the Brazilian website Mac Magazine, anyway.
A reader, identified only as JOSZé claims to have discovered a counter embedded in Apple’s website that, when advanced to the number 1,000,000,000 will return the page you see above.
As the editors at Mac Magazine said, “sorry to spoil the surprise.”
Thanks to Rafael for the tip!
UPDATE: Rafael, from Mac Magazine, tells Cult of Mac the secret to revealing the waiting “Thanks a Billion” page lies in changing the time and date on your Mac to something in advance of the date you might expect the magic number to be reached. A recent check of the App Store’s counter says more than 990,000,000 apps have been downloaded as of this writing.
I get asked a lot why I prefer Macs to PCs. Sometimes it’s from a Windows fan trying to pick a fight, sometimes it’s from a platform agnostic who’s interested why I care enough to choose. But the intent is the same — what makes you so passionate?
And after citing obvious reasons like the elegance of Apple’s hardware and software design or the way everything just works out of the box, I almost inevitably bring up something that seems to dull to get excited about: OS upgrades. Not that they happen, but that it’s always easy for me to know which edition of OS X to buy, and I never feel like Apple is needlessly squeezing pennies out of me by charging more for the features that make it worthwhile to upgrade. Leopard was Leopard. Snow Leopard will be Snow Leopard. Easy.
This is the opposite of the Windows experience, in which there will be seven (!) versions of Windows 7 to choose from, some of which are hopelessly crippled. The worst of these is Windows Starter, designed just for Netbooks.
We all know that the vast majority of personal computers run Windows, with a significant but smaller number using Linux and Mac OS X, and then teeny slices using other operating systems like Solaris and Amiga OS. What might not be so obvious is that Microsoft has become equally dominant in the new Netbook market, with Windows XP or Vista shipping on 95 percent of the tiny lappies compared to just five percent for Linux.
And Microsoft, sitting on top of a dominant market position in netbooks, is quickly formulating a plan to actively screw over their potential customers. In the fall (if they’re lucky) MS will roll out Windows 7, which, from my testing of it, is a lot like Vista without all of the most glaring problems. Alongside Windows 7 will be a version custom-designed for netbooks called “Windows 7 Starter,” which will, I swear to you, only be allowed to run three simultaneous applications and won’t feature the same UI as more expensive flavors of the OS. Those features are present — you’ll just need to pay Microsoft for an upgrade code to access them. So forget about running Word, Firefox, iTunes, and Outlook at the same time if you’re on Windows Starter.
Here’s why this is a brain-dead strategy. The only reason to get a Windows netbook is to run Windows applications. If you’re limited to only three apps at a time, it’s actually saner to use Cloud apps in a Web browser. And if you’re going to do that, it makes more sense to just go with Linux or another alternative. Starter is intended to make people want to buy the nicer versions of Windows 7. I think it’s net effect is more likely to be that people seriously consider alternatives.
And that’s why Apple’s dedication to making OS X available in just normal and server versions is one of the best decisions Steve Jobs has ever made. Apple has ignored the netbook market up until now, but it’s safe to say if Apple did release a netbook, it would be a premium offering at the high-end of the market and run a full version of Mac OS X. That’s just how Apple rolls.
Apple is back in Fortune magazine’s elite Fortune 100 list for the first time since 1994, according to new rankings released in the magazine’s issue dated May 4 but made available this week online.
Thanks in part to the declining performance of companies previously ranked ahead of it, Apple jumped 32 spots above its 2008 ranking, to rejoin the list of the 100 largest US corporations for the first time since Steve Jobs returned to lead the company in 1997.
Among Apple’s largest U.S. competitors, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) came in at No. 9, Dell (DELL) at No. 33 and Microsoft (MSFT) at No. 35. Apple (AAPL) placed at No. 71 on revenues that grew 35.3% to $32.479 billion in 2008.
Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s CEO, has been calling on Apple to see about extending the carrier’s deal as the exclusive US service provider for the iPhone, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Having already received a one-year extension of its original two year deal, with its current exclusivity protection set to expire sometime in 2010, AT&T is reportedly seeking to sweeten the pot somehow to keep Apple’s revolutionary mobile device out of competitors’ hands for another year.
Well, of course. AT&T added 4.3 million iPhone subscribers in the second half of 2008 alone — about 40% of whom were new customers, according to the company. In an era when landline customers are dwindling rapidly, anything that brings in new wireless subscribers is a good thing for the phone company.
But is the AT&T exclusivity deal good for anyone other than AT&T?
From Apple’s perspective it’s likely good insofar as it keeps things simple, having only one behemoth service provider to potentially screw up the tightly controlled customer experience around which much of Apple’s mystique has been been built. And to be fair, AT&T appears to have done a reasonably good job of deploying iPhones in the field. As the Apple spokeswoman in the WSJ article was quoted, “We have a great relationship with AT&T.”
But how about the consumer? Even if technical issues cannot be overcome that prevent iPhones, as they are currently manufactured, from working with Sprint and Verizon’s CDMA-based services — and surely they could be overcome in this day and age — having a choice between AT&T and T-Mobile is better than having a choice between AT&T and not using an iPhone at all.
Many people howled furiously about AT&T being the exclusive US provider when the iPhone was introduced in the summer of 2007. Looking back, it’s now easy to see how revolutionary and wildly transformative the device was; it was likely a good strategy for Apple to reduce its integration bandwidth to a single carrier in each market where it deployed the phone because it could have turned out to be more problematic a transformation than it actually was.
But now Apple has many millions of happy iPhone users the world over and it knows how its device performs in the field. It’s time for Apple to reclaim dominion over the user experience with its mobile communication device. And the single biggest change that would add to customer happiness (other than video recording capability and Flash functionality) would be to open it up up and let customers choose whatever service provider they can stand.
“People familiar with Apple’s operations say they still expect to see Mr. Jobs return in June. Some of these people also say members of Apple’s board of directors are monitoring the situation directly, communicating regularly with Mr. Jobs’s physicians.
People inside the company, business partners and others who are familiar with the situation say life at the Cupertino, Calif., company remains much the same as it did before.
Those at other corporations who deal with the company also say their interactions with Apple haven’t changed. Mr. Cook, who had already been handling most of Apple’s day-to-day operations, has kept tight control over the company, say business partners and those inside Apple.”
The article also speculates about the future of Apple management, stock prices and employee turnover.
There are a number of excellent reasons to be bullish on Apple (AAPL) stock, according to Wall Street analyst Shaw Wu. Despite already having risen 45% on the year, Wu believes Apple could bake another 25% or more of profit into its share price, based on expectations around what the Kaufman Bros. high-tech analyst calls “several catalysts in the months ahead.”
“We anticipate [Apple’s] new iPhone 3.0 software to ship” in time for the 2009 WWDC in June, Wu said in a report released Monday. He’s also expecting consumer interest in Apple to remain strong with the introduction of new iPhone hardware, also in time for WWDC.
The expected launch of Snow Leopard should be a further catalyst for the Mac business, which has already seen a boost from recent desktop refreshes (iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Pro). “And last,” Wu said, “the potential for a new form factor, perhaps Apple’s answer to the netbook, with a large screen iPod touch-Mac hybrid” could end up pushing AAPL from its current $119 price to something more like $152.
Less than a month ago, on March 24, Wu removed Apple from his “Focus List” citing the appreciating stock (then up only 19%) and the fact that “many of the product catalysts we were looking for, namely the new iMac, have occurred.” But that was at a point just after the overall stock market had been tanking since January; in the last several weeks the market’s been on a tear and some in the financial analysis business believe the worst of the “recession” is behind us.
For a little more perspective on the inscrutable science of stock price analysis, recall that less than a year ago, when Apple was opening its AppStore and releasing the iPhone 3G, Wu and many other AAPL analysts expected the company’s stock to go as high as $225. AAPL had already topped out just over $200 prior to the AppStore launch and nose-dived to well below $100 by January of this year.
