Disney is an entertainment giant. But with assets valued at a total of just (!) $81 billion, Apple could probably snap it up with the money Tim Cook uses to wedge his office door open with. There are people who will swear up and down that an Apple/Disney buyout makes perfect sense — particularly given Steve Jobs’ history as a major Disney shareholder.
Recently Francis McInerney, a consultant at North River Ventures, called the deal “frighteningly obvious” and said that “the logic is so great this could happen tomorrow.” Rumors of an Apple/Disney merger go back at least as far as 1999 when it was reported that Disney planned to acquire both Apple and Pixar in a $12 billion stock swap, with Steve Jobs being ordained CEO of the mega-company. Since then, this rumor has come back with surprising regularity — although it’s unknown exactly why Apple would be interested in running theme parks and making animated movies.
Disney shareholders have re-elected Steve Jobs to the company’s board of directors, despite opposition from the AFL-CIO, the labor union federation.
As previously reported, the AFL-CIO opposed Jobs’s re-election because of his poor health and his job as CEO of Apple. The union argued that Jobs already had his hands full and advised shareholders not ro re-elect him.
Nonetheless, Jobs was re-elected on Wednesday at Disney’s annual shareholder meeting in Utah, according to Bloomberg.
With 7% of Disney’s stock, Jobs is the largest individual shareholder in the company. He has been a director at Disney since 2006, when Disney bought his other company, Pixar, for $7.4 billion.
First up in the deal spotlight is seven refurbished MacBook Air laptops from the Apple Store, starting with a 64GB unit with a 11.6-inch screen for $849. Also on tap is “Monkey Island: Special Editition for Mac,” just one of the two free downloads from MacUpdate. We close out today’s featured items with a 27-inch LED Cinema Display for $849.
Along the way, we check out a number of cases for your iPad, as well as a bargain on an iPod touch and various accessories for your iPhone and iPod. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Textbooks based on the iPad gained a boost Wednesday. Interactive learning developer Inkling announced a “multi-million dollar financing” deal with two educational publishing giants. McGraw-Hill and Pearsons became minority investors in the San Francisco-based company which produces software enabling students to interact with iPad-based textbooks.
“Until now, digital textbooks have failed to gain real traction because they add little value over the printed book,” Inkling founder and CEO Matt MacInnis said. Inkling’s software allows readers to add comments and share textbooks with friends. “We build every textbook from the ground up for the iPad to create a more engaging learning experience,” MacInnis adds.
Remember Word Lens, the jaw-dropping iOS Babelfish that allowed you to just point your iPhone at a sign in Spanish and turning it into English (and vice-versa?)
Well, if you’ve got an iPad 2, good news: your camera-equipped tablet is now fully supported in the latest version of the free app.
Of course, “free” should be surrounded by insidious quotes, because in reality, there’s nothing free about Word Lens. You can download it for free, sure, but the app does nothing without buying either the Spanish to English or English to Spanish modules as an in-app purchase… each of which costs $9.99.
Word Lens is still one of the biggest jaw-dropper programs on the App Store, though. If you’ve got an iPad 2 and are just itching to show someone what it can do, picking up Word Lens for free $9.99 is a choice option.
AT&T’s proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile would result in new efficiencies and economies of scale. It would enable the provisioning of more and better services at lower cost than the two companies could achieve separately.
And that’s exactly why the Obama administration may block it.
The venerable iPod Classic hasn’t been update since September 2009, and even that was a negligible update to the last model, the sixth-generation iPod debuting in 2007. The long gap, coupled with Apple’s increasing focus on their iOS devices, have prompted some to ask if we’d see the discontinuation of the iPod Classic sometime soon… especially as it looks increasingly likely that the next iPod Touch might come with as much as 128GB of flash storage.
If you love the iPod Classic, though, don’t pay the morbid speculation any mind. Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself has weighed in upon the matter, writing a (nearly hysterical) MacRumors reader and saying that they have “no plans” to kill off the iPod Classic.
Honestly, that sort of relieves me. It’s easy to look at the iPod Classic as antiquated tech, but I like to think of it like a samurai sword, razor-keen and honed to perfection after countless foldings. That it doesn’t have the same functionality as a ray gun doesn’t make a samurai sword obsolete, it just makes it less flashy, more focused and subtle.
The iPod Classic is aimed at exactly one kind of person: the guy who wants to have his entire music collection in his pocket at all times. As music file sizes get larger, as digital music collections grow, there’s always going to be someone for whom the iPod Touch just doesn’t cut it. Apple always wants to be able to sell those guys an iPod. They’re the guys who built the brand to begin with.
UPDATE: Brian Tong sent me a note pointing out my unfair characterization of him as “just a TV show host.” Brian has worked at CNet for three years where he is an editor. He’s a journalism major and even used to work in Apple retail. He’s got lots of contacts at the company. My apologies to Brian for unfairly questioning his credentials.
New iMacs with Sandy Bridge CPUs and the zippy new Thunderbolt port are due at the end of April or the first week of May, according to CNet TV presenter Brian Tong, citing “anonymous sources.”
There won’t be a redesign. The new machines will look the same as the old, which is no bad thing.
The source of this info is a bit iffy. Tong isn’t a traditional is a tech reporter — he’s a TV show host — but he does work in tech news and Tong is an editor at CNet and host of CNet TV’s The Apple Byte Show. He says he’s “highly confident” about his source.
The Sandy Bridge update is definitely on the cards. What’s new is the ship date — four to six weeks. This in line with our interactive Buyer’s Guide, which says an iMac update is overdue.
Please, please, please let this be true. I’m in the market for a new desktop to replace my old Mac Pro, and Sandy Bridge, big screens and Thunderbolt make for a juicy, juicy update.
The last iMac update was about eight months ago with Intel’s Core i3, i5 and i7 chips and ATI Radeon graphics. But the MacBook Pros were just updated with quad-core Sandy Bridge processors, and they’re screamers.
Thunderbolt is a new port for high-speed peripherals and displays. Dubbed “one connector to rule them all,” it’s a single 10Gbps cable that consolidates almost all existing ports, from FireWire to USB to miniDisplay to eSATA.
Samsung, the South Korean “frenemy” of tech giant Apple, Tuesday released its two Galaxy Tab devices, both aimed squarely at Apple’s iPad. Taking a page from RIM, which earlier in the day unveiled its own PlayBook tablet, Samsung set its Galaxy Tab 10.1 at prices mirroring the iPad 2: $499 and $599 for 16GB and 32GB Wi-Fi versions, respectively.
However, both Tabs have a 1280×800 pixel display, versus the iPad 2’s 1024×768 9.7-inch screen. The Samsung devices shave a hair from its thickness. Still the difference (Samsung’s 8.6 millimeter versus the iPad’s 8.8 mm) is only noticeable with someone carrying a finely-tuned scale.
We start the day with a deal from the Apple Store on 13 Core i5 and Core i7 MacBook Pro units, beginning at $1,439 for a 2.53GHz i5 model. Also on tap is a deal on the iLife ’11 home productivity software suite for just $30. The spotlight wraps up with a 20 percent discount on cases for the iPad and Amazon Kindle.
Along the way, we check out a number of other bargains, including software and hardware. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
