Apple has emailed journalists to an event in San Francisco on March 7th at 10:00 AM. This is reported to be the iPad 3 event that people have been talking about.
The invite shows an iPad so this looks a reasonable bet.
The iPad 2 was announced by Steve Jobs on March 2 and available in the US from March 11 and sold like hot cakes with international markets becoming available on March 25th.
The Apple home page shows the number of apps downloaded from the site.
That’s a big number of apps that iPhone, iPad and iPod owners have downloaded: Some free and some purchased.
Whoever scores App number 25,000,000,000 wins a $10K iTunes card. Sweet indeed.
- Update – March 4th – We have a winner of the $10K iTunes card. Congratulations Chunli Fu
Apple shows sneak peek of the next release of the Mac operating system, OS X. The next release is scheduled for summer 2012 and an early beta is available for developers.
It brings a bunch of iOS features like messaging and to do list from the iPad to the Mac. It also shows the integration of your TV screen with virtually any Apple device via Apple TV. Maybe Apple TV is more than a hobby.
Check out the video on the Apple site:
The newish Apple data centre in Maiden NC that was opened recently in line with the iPhone 4S and Siri uses a huge amount of electricity to keep it ruining smoothly and nicely chilled.
According to the latest environmental report from Apple the centre will benefit from a massive solar array.
The report states ”
Te read more download the Apple report.
News from Reuters: Feb 21:
China Telecom Corp. will become the nation’s second wireless operator to offer Apple Inc.’s iPhone 4S, two months after “staggering” demand prompted the U.S. company to suspend sales at its own stores.
From March 9, Chinese users who commit to a two-year contract can get a free 16-gigabyte handset with a service plan costing 389 yuan ($62) a month, the state-owned parent of China Telecom, the nation’s third-largest wireless carrier, said in a statement today. A three-year plan cuts the monthly minimum to 289 yuan.
For Apple, adding China Telecom as a distributor in the world’s largest mobile-phone market almost doubles the number of potential iPhone buyers who can get a subsidized handset from a service operator. That may alleviate some of the supply bottleneck that led to Apple’s main Beijing store being pelted with eggs when it didn’t open for the first day of iPhone 4S sales in January.
“This is definitely going to give a plus to Apple shipments,” said Sandy Shen, a Shanghai-based analyst at research company Gartner Inc. “On the other hand, China Telecom is still the country’s smallest mobile operator, so the extent to which it can help Apple may be limited.”
China Unicom
China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd., the nation’s first carrier to offer the iPhone with a service contract in October 2009, began selling the 4S in January. China Unicom had 43 million subscribers to its high-speed, third-generation network at the end of January. China Telecom had 38.7 million 3G subscribers at the end of last month.
Apple was the fifth-largest smartphone vendor in China in the fourth quarter, with shipments of 2.08 million handsets, or 7.5 percent of the total, according to Gartner data. Samsung Electronics Co. was the market leader with 24 percent, followed by Nokia Oyj, Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp., according to Gartner.
China Telecom will make an “appropriate increase in marketing initiatives” in connection with iPhone sales, the company said in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange today. Expenses to market the phone will mean “short-term pressure on its profitability,” it said, without providing figures.
Earnings Estimates
“The iPhone will be positive for China Telecom’s subscriber growth, but it will be negative for earnings growth in the first year,” Lisa Soh, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Macquarie Group Ltd., said in a phone interview today. “Earnings estimates will have to come down because of higher subsidies for the iPhone.”
Soh said she hadn’t updated her earnings estimates yet to account for iPhone sales. China Telecom’s earnings growth could be cut roughly in half to about 5 percent, said Jim Tang, an analyst at Shenyin Wanguo Securities Co. in Shanghai. Higher iPhone subsidies will force the company to cut subsidies for cheaper models that have been the main driver of user growth, Tang said.
China Telecom shares gained 1.1 percent to HK$4.47 at 11:51 a.m. in Hong Kong trading.
Cupertino, California-based Apple had underestimated the “staggering” demand for the iPhone 4S when it started sales in China, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said last month.
“We thought we were betting bold,” Cook said on a Jan. 24 conference call. “We didn’t bet high enough.”
Pelted With Eggs
Apple’s oldest store in China was pelted with eggs from a crowd of customers on Jan. 13 when the shop, in Beijing’s Sanlitun district, failed to open on the first day of sales for the iPhone 4S. After police sealed off the area to remove more than 500 people, Apple said it would suspend sales of iPhones at all its stores.
Currently, iPhones are available in China through Apple’s online store, resellers and China Unicom.
“IPhone 4S has been an incredible hit with customers around the world,” Carolyn Wu, a Beijing-based spokeswoman for Apple, said by phone. The company “can’t wait to get it into the hands of even more customers in China,” she said.
China Mobile Ltd., the world’s largest carrier by customers, is now the only Chinese wireless company not offering the iPhone with a service contract. The iPhone doesn’t support the provider’s third-generation network, based on a China- developed technology.
Apple stock surges past $500 for an all time high. Apple Inc. is now the most valuable company in the world.
In the last month the stock has surged close to $100 and is now pushing $510 a pop. A quick calculation gives a market cap of $470 Billion.
Many people argue that at the current price it is still cheap. Apple trades at 14 times last 4 quarters earnings, this is very close to the S&P average. Strange as Apple is hardly in average territory with sales growth of 70% compared to single digit for the vast bulk of the S&P.
Excellent reporting from Asymco on iPhone sales and activations.
The US market led by AT&T and Verizon was recently joined by Sprint and while these carriers have been shifting boat loads of phones their sales have been dwarfed by international sales.
The chart below shows the share of units for the last few years.
In the most recent quarter the distribution was limited in most non US markets. Now that Chinese sales are ramping fast this graph will only likely increase.
We have had the figures for a week. The graph below shows the real news: Huge boost during the last quarter. Profit of $13 B on sales of $46 B. These are huge numbers.
Apple reported its earnings excluding items more than doubled to $7.79 a share in its fiscal third quarter from $3.51 a share in the year-earlier period.
Revenue shot up 82 percent to $28.57 billion from $15.7 billion in the year-earlier period.
Analysts had expected Apple to report earnings of $5.85 a share on revenue of $24.9 billion.
Sales of iPads and iPhones were strong during the quarter: The company said it sold 9.25 million iPads during the quarter, nearly triple the amount it sold a year earlier. IPhone sales more than doubled to 20.34 million. Mac sales increased 14 percent to 3.95 million units.
Cash flow more than doubled to $11.1 billion, the company said.
The company, known for its conservative guidance, said it expects earnings of $5.50 a share on revenue of $25 billion for the current quarter.
Apple’s numbers are out and it is a monster blowout!
Apple beat expectations across the board. We have all the important numbers below.
Shares are up 10% in after hours trading.
The biggest number that jumps out: 37 million iPhones sold. That easily beats the Street’s whisper number of 34 million iPhones.
The next number is 15.4 million iPads sold, which clobbers the 13 million expectation.
Here’s what Apple did versus Wall Street expectations, via Piper Jaffray’s.
Information care of BI site
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/live-apple-earnings-2012-1?nr_email_referer=1&utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=SAI%20Select&utm_campaign=SAI%20Select%202012-01-25#ixzz1kSxu2MjT
Read the release and listen to Apple play back at http://investor.apple.com/
In a special press conference in New York on Tuesday Jan 17th, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller announced iBooks 2, an attempt to unify online databases and the printed word into a single educational tool.
With rich, engaging content and powerful annotation capabilities, digital textbooks will help American students better compete with peers abroad, Schiller said.
Though many teachers have embraced the company’s iPad and thousands of education apps available for it, adoption has been limited in scope, Schiller said. A formal platform to obtain this kind of content will accelerate adoption.
DIGITAL TEXTBOOKS: MORE DYNAMIC
On the presentation side, a digital textbook can be compelling. Schiller demonstrated how a portrait layout can help the student focus on text, while a landscape layout can help him or her focus on multimedia content, such as interactive photos or animations.
See a term you don’t understand? You can click on it for more information, just like you can on an e-book reader. That’s something physical textbooks don’t allow for, Schiller said. (Ditto the ability to highlight passages and instantly make digital flash cards from your own notes, both of which he demonstrated.)
A new “textbooks” category in iBooks is the seed for Apple’s new venture. Best of all, students can own the book forever, and download it any time from the cloud. (No word on how updates — long the moneymaker for the industry — will be priced.) And it goes without saying that a digital textbook won’t weigh a ton.
ONE FOR THE PUBLISHERS
As for content creators, a new, free iBooks Author app allows you to create interactive e-books. The application has a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG interface and default templates (math, science) so it’s easy to get existing content into the cloud. It also has a one-click glossary function.
More technically savvy publishers can use Javascript to create their own widgets and HTML 5 for layout, and thus, experience. (Cue the beginning of the publisher-as-developer era for the textbook industry. Welcome, folks! Us newsies have been here for about two decades now.)
PRICING
But perhaps the biggest shift in the industry will be around pricing and distribution. Schiller said new high school textbooks would be priced at $14.99 or less — and they’re always up-to-date. (No word on college-level and above.)
Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Dorling Kindersley are among Apple’s publishing partners, and their products (Algebra 1, Environmental Science, etc.) are available in the store today.
Which begs the question: will high school students now have to pay for their textbooks? Or does Apple envision a future where school-provided iPads, preloaded with e-textbooks, are deployed?
ITUNES U
Finally, Apple’s iTunes U service — a neat offering of university lectures-as-podcasts buried in the iTunes Store — will get a leg up. Through an update, the iTunes U app will offer a spot for a syllabus, course material, office hours info and more within a single iOS app. It even allows for professor-to-student messaging.
In other words: a complete digital course resource — no more Microsoft Word attachments via e-mail, and no more web-based solutions like Blackboard. (Which begs yet another question: Apple may have a leg up on mobile here, but are universities really willing to let go of their existing platforms?)
For now it comes down to adoption. Yale, MIT, Duke, Stanford and others are already on iTunes U; it remains to be seen whether other universities (and K-12 institutions, for that matter) will follow suit, given the new capabilities.
THE BOTTOM LINE
In the end, this all depends on adoption of the iPad. Institutions and individuals alike already love them. Will these new tools make them love them enough to replace, rather than augment, their current setups?
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