March madness: 7 AAPL record highs
With a hot phone, a new tablet and the lion's share of PC profits, Apple is on a tear
Apple (AAPL) closed at 228.36 Tuesday, up 3.61 points (1.61%) for the day to hit another record high — its seventh since March 5.
While the whole market was up Tuesday — and tech stocks in particular — Apple has been enjoying a particular strong run. Its shares have climbed nearly 14% in the past month and more than 36 points since Feb. 4, when Wall Street went cold on the stock in the wake of the iPad's unveiling.
Since then:
13 ways of looking at an iPad
Wired taps a baker's dozen of the "brightest tech minds" to mark the rise of the tablet
Source: Wired magazine
"With the iPad," writes Steven Levy in How the Tablet Will Change the World, "Apple is making its play to become the center of a post-PC era."
Levy argues that the conventions underlying today's personal computers — the graphical user interface, the shrink-wrapped boxes of software — were forged 40 and 50 year ago.
What we are entering now, he writes, is a world of downloadable apps, instant micropayments and machines on which we’ll perform ever more complicated tasks "by rolling, tapping, and drumming our fingers on screens, like pianists tickling the ivories."
Levy's piece is the intro to Wired's current cover package, Rise of the Machines!, and the prelude to a string of commentary about Apple's (AAPL) latest creation by what it bills as some of the brightest minds in tech — including a TV hostess, a fake CEO and a man who has been dead for 30 years.
A sampling of what they had to say:
NYC's new landmark: The Apple Store
It's the Big Apple's fifth most-photographed location, according to a Cornell study
Fifth Ave. Apple Store. Photo: yesthatkarim via Flickr
In a front-page story in Monday's Philadelphia Inquirer, the paper's architecture critic, Inga Saffron, leads with a scene in which a pair of Manhattan tourists dash out of a waiting taxi to snap photos of Apple's (AAPL) Fifth Avenue store. She tells the story to Peter Bohlin, the architect who originally sketched the big glass cube with paper and pencil for Steve Jobs.
"I hear that happens a lot," Bohlin chuckles.
Indeed it does. According to an analysis of 35 million Flickr images undertaken by Cornell students on a university supercomputer, the Fifth Avenue Apple Store is the fifth most photographed landmark in the world's most photographed city — and the 28th most photographed landmark in the world.
The study, available as a [PDF], was actually presented nearly a year ago at the World Wide Web Conference in Madrid (see the Cornell Chronicle.) But it's been rediscovered in the past few days by several New York City blogs, including the Gothamist.
None of this hurts Apple's well-polished brand image, of course. But there's a risk for Steve Jobs. Were the cube to be granted official New York City landmark status, he'd never be able to tear it down. (Unlike his unloved Woodside, Calif., mansion. See here and here.)
New York City's five most photographed landmarks are:
Broken China
The burgeoning superpower keeps sabotaging its relationships with the outside world.
By Paul Smalera, writer
Google has long been embarrassed by having to restrict its search results in China and promised to stop the practice as soon as it could. The company agreed to self-censor in 2006 as a devil’s bargain to gain access to the Chinese market. But after last year’s successful and major hacking of its Chinese operations (possibly at the direction of Chinese leaders) CEO Eric Schmidt seems to have had enough. “Something will happen soon,” he said about the company’s China presence , just last week.
Today, Google showed its hand. In a blog post, the company’s chief legal officer explained that Google China now redirects to Google.com.hk — Hong Kong. The search results are “specifically designed for users in mainland China.” Although China has blocked Hong Kong websites from the mainland in the past, most Beijing laws, including those regarding Internet censorship, do not apply in Hong Kong or China’s other “Special Administrative Region,” Macao.
China may soon block Google’s Hong Kong redirect from the mainland, but the whole episode is a remarkable example of how China’s protectionist tendencies have yet again forced a tense and tricky situation, this time with one of the world’s most powerful companies. A few years ago, China was winning some begrudging international praise for finding ways to integrate capitalism into its Communist political structure. But it’s now clear that it never intended for that advance to turn into a two-way street. More
For sale: A million-dollar iPad address
Behind those iPad domain names on eBay with asking prices in the stratosphere
About a year ago, when Apple's (AAPL) latest creation was, as far as anyone outside Cupertino knew, still but a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye, Nik Tyler made an inspired guess.
The tablet computer Apple was rumored to be building, he believed, would be called the iPad.
"I just had a feeling," says Tyler, 31, a record producer from Woodstock, Md. Based on that feeling he went out and reserved, for $6 apiece, three Web addresses: ipaddownload.com, ipaddownloads.com and ipaddownloads.net.
And last week, shortly after Apple began taking pre-orders for the iPad, he put all three domains up for sale on eBay (EBAY) for the Buy-It-Now price of $1 million each. (See here.)
"This is probably the first very smart thing I have ever done in my life," he says.
But Tyler is not the only entrepreneur with the same bright idea.
The magic of 285 Apple Stores
How the company's growing retail presence is driving Mac market share gains
Source: Morgan Stanley
In a report to clients issued overnight Monday about Apple's (AAPL) opportunities for growth in China, Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty adds, almost as a throwaway, the instructive charts at right (see also below the fold).
They show what she calls the "Positive Correlation Between Apple Store Expansion and Mac Market Share."
Correlation does not mean causation, of course, but the trends do seem clear. Apple opened 123 stores in the U.S. between Sept. 2003 and Sept. 2009 while the Mac's domestic market share grew from just over 3% to as high as 9% (before dipping below 8% last summer).
In Western Europe, the effect seems even more dramatic: 33 stores and a market share that grew from as low as 1.5% to more than 5%.
All this is to support Huberty's contention that China represents Apple’s next major geographic growth opportunity, and that Apple's plan to open 25 retail stores in China, announced during its shareholders meeting in February, could help drive Apple's share price — in her "bull case" scenario — as high as $325 to $435 within a year. See here.
Below: Those bar charts, full size.
Starz goes from second-tier movie channel to Hollywood power broker
In the battle over home video distribution, the Hollywood studios may finally be realizing they have to give up some control, or risk losing millions.
Earlier this month, Disney (DIS) announced that it is renewing its licensing agreement with Starz Entertainment, giving the premium movie provider behind the Starz and Encore movie channels exclusive pay-TV rights to show content from Walt Disney Studios.
But this deal was a little different than most: industry watchers predicted that it was never going to happen or that it would come only after a long, ugly battle.
The fact that there's been so little uproar raised around it signals one thing: the studios are realizing that they have to give up some control in how their movies get to consumers. And the companies that stand to benefit are Netflix (NFLX) and whichever startups inevitably rise to challenge it. More
iPad week 1: 190,000 pre-orders
The rate slows to 5,000 per day as Apple offers school discounts and begins accepting apps
Photo: Apple Inc.
It's been a busy week for the iPad.
It started off with a bang, as Apple (AAPL) racked up pre-orders at the rate of more than 25,000 units per hour early Friday March 12, according to the team tracking order numbers at Investor Village's AAPL Sanity board.
By Sunday, the initial frenzy had cooled. The pre-order rate slowed to 30,000 units per day on Monday, 10,000 on Wednesday and 5,000 on Thursday.
Total pre-orders for the week: 190,000 units according to Daniel Tello, who's been manning the spreadsheet for AAPL Sanity. (See his chart below.) That doesn't include bulk orders by institutions or reservations for store pickup, which the Boy Genius reports were pouring in that first weekend at the same rate as pre-orders.
"Based on this," writes Deagol, "and using my intuition and experience, and voodoo or however you want to call it, I'm sticking to my prediction of 1 million sold by mid-April.
That's considerably less than the estimate of 1 to 2 million units by April 3, which an anonymous analyst had offered TheStreet (perhaps set the stock up for a fall?)
But it's not bad for a product few customers have set eyes on, never mind held in their hands.
Meanwhile, in other iPad news:
Steve Jobs: 'I was almost one of the ones that died waiting for a liver'
A year later, he talks about the liver transplant operation that saved his life.
Credit: San Jose Mercury News video
"I was lucky," said Steve Jobs in brief remarks Friday in support of a new California organ donation bill. "Because many others died waiting for a transplant."
After being introduced as "the Steve" by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Apple's (AAPL) CEO spoke for only the second time in public about the liver transplant he received in great secrecy last year, answering in the process several of the questions that swirled around the operation at the time — including when it happened and why it happened in Memphis.
"I was receiving great care here in Stanford," he said, "but there were simply not enough livers to go around. And my doctors here advised me to enroll in a transplant program in Memphis, Tenn., where the supply/demand ratio is more favorable than it is here in California. And I was lucky enough to get a liver in time. As a matter of fact, this coming week is my one year anniversary."
A video of the event is available here through the San Jose Mercury News and posted below the fold.
Tracking the iPad's post-Oscar buzz
The first TV ads gave Apple's tablet computer a short-lived shot in the arm
Click to enlarge. Source: YouGov BrandIndex
In the weeks since Steve Jobs unveiled his latest creation, public perception of the iPad has been all over the lot — up, down and sideways.
The chart at right, produced by YouGov's BrandIndex, is a snapshot of that roller coaster ride taken in the days before and just after Apple (AAPL) aired the first iPad TV ads during the 82nd Academy Awards.
"The Oscar night ad debut gave Apple a short-lived shot in the arm with adults 18+, sending it from a 35 buzz score the day after the Oscars to 38.5 a couple of days afterwards," says YouGov's Drew Kerr. "However, perception has been rocky since then, with the brand's buzz score now at 32.4, reflecting the public's indecision about the product."
