Amidst concerns about trademark battles in China, an unprecedented factory audit of Foxconn, and the question of potential stock dividends, Apple is scheduled to meet with AAPL shareholders tomorrow at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. All investors are encouraged to attend.
Yup, it’s finally happened: buoyed by the imminent launch of the iPad 3, Apple (AAPL) stock has just hit a historic high of over $500.00 a share, and now is worth a $466.29 Billion, over $70 billion more than the world’s second most valuable company, Exxon Mobil.
That’s amazing, but there’s still plenty of room to grow, believe it or not. In fact, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes that Apple could go as high as $1000 per share, at which point, every man, woman and child on this Earth will be an Apple employee, grown to order in special chemical vats in Brazil and China, but designed, as ever, in Cupertino, California.
Some of Apple’s stock iPhone apps would work wonderfully on the iPad, such as Clock, Stocks, Weather, and Calculator. But the Cupertino company seems to have no plans to port these apps over to the larger device. After all, I’m sure if it did we’d already have them by now.
But thanks to a new utility for jailbroken iPads called Belfry, you can port them over yourself.
Good news for Apple shareholders: stock reached an all-time high during mid-day trading today, peaking at $427.75 per share. The last record was set in October of 2011 at $426.70 per share. Despite some slightly tumultuous times on Wall Street after Apple failed to meet analyst expectations with its fourth-quarter earnings report, Apple stock has continued to climb to new heights year after year. The company will announce its earnings from the first-quarter of 2012 (or the 2011 holiday season) on Tuesday, January 24th. Apple also released its proxy statement for 2012 to investors this afternoon, in which it is revealed that CEO Time Cook received a total of $376,180,000 in compensation for 2011.
It’s hard living in a post-PC world, especially if you’re chip giant Intel. A Wall Street analyst downgraded the company from “Buy” to “Neutral” after key PC makers signaled plans to adopt rival ARM – not to mention the smartphones and tablets also throwing sand in Intel’s face.
Greedy rumor-mongers didn’t even wait until Tim Cook started running the show at Apple to begin spreading rumors of his plans to quit. Back in 2010, investor gossip site Fly On The Wall wrongly suggested that Cook was off to join HP as its new CEO. (Gullible investors actually led to Apple stock dropping 20 points as a result.) Now that Cook is CEO it’s a bit more difficult to make those kinds of reports convincing, so the narrative has instead changed to suggest the Apple board is unhappy with Cook’s performance and plans to drop him at the earliest possible opportunity. Well, plenty of opportunities have presented themselves, but Cook’s still hanging on in there.
Maybe (shock horror!) people have realized he’s actually doing a pretty great job.
If you thought pulling a rabbit out of your hat was cutting-edge magic, you haven’t talked to Apple CEO Tim Cook lately. Give him three months, and Cook can convert 300,000 Apple shares into almost $100 million dollars. Pretty neat trick, huh? In fact, Cook leads all Silicon Valley executives in the largest cash haul from company stock, according to just-released data.
For the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the saying about death and taxes being life’s only certainty probably rings true — particularly taxes. Laurene Powell Jobs learned she must pay $867 million in capital gains taxes and is being advised to unload millions of Disney and Apple shares worth nearly $7 billion.
When Disney CEO Robert Iger joined Apple’s board of directors, the tech giant offered him a little gift — and it wasn’t a fruit basket. No, Iger received shares worth more than an estimated $84,000. Of course, the amount is Mickey Mouse compared to the $29 million he pulls in as Disney’s head exec.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjg8tmGC3O8&feature=player_embedded
Since iOS 5 was released two weeks ago, jailbreak tweak developers have been hard at work creating third-party widgets that can be integrated into the new Notification Center. The latest is called WeeTranslate, and offers a quick and easy way to access Google Translate on your iPhone.
