Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"For those of you who weren't listening in to Apple's earnings call today, you missed a prime moment of defensiveness when Tim Cook fielded a question about how the company plans to stay competitive amidst new entries from the likes of Google and, more recently, Palm. What seemed like an answer due to end with a "we've got some great new stuff on the way" slant, Cook dovetailed into how the company views its new smartphone competition."

Sounds like they are paying attention to the market and the competition, as anyone that has followed Apple would expect. Tim Cook pointed out that while they "like competition because it makes us better, but we will not stand for companies infringing on our IP."

"Apple reported first-quarter earnings significantly higher than analysts had expected coming off a disappointing holiday season for most tech companies, but provided its usual conservative guidance."

Economic downturn and dismal holiday sales didn't seem to affect Apple. For the three-month period ending December 27th, they recorded $10.2 billion in revenue, net income of $1.6 billion and earnings per share of $1.78, all categories exceeding figures for the same period last year. Of course one of the first questions asked was "how is Steve?"

"An e-book submitted to Apple's App Store has been approved after the author removed language that apparently offended Apple. CNET's David Carnoy wrote a book called Knife Music last year, and attempted to submit it to the App Store as an e-book. Apple rejected his application for containing "objectionable content," which appeared to be a couple of uses of that four-letter word that starts with F."

Having never read any of the documents pertaining to submissions to the iTunes App Store, I was a little surprised by this. The author apparently wasn't, said the words didn't materially change the story, and removed them. I understand that it is their store and they can set up the guidelines however they wish, but I wonder why they didn't label it with the explicit tag (like they do for music and podcasts) and let it go at that?

"Apple's share of the US computer market fell to 8 percent during the fourth calendar quarter of 2008 from 9.5 percent in the third as the Mac maker surrendered its third place ranking to surging netbook maker Acer, according to market research firm Gartner."

Acer jumped ahead of Apple per Gartner, from the sounds of it with lots of help from their netbooks, with a whopping 55.4% growth. However, based on this data, Apple is still one of only three of the top PC vendors that had positive growth in the 4th quarter of 2008, Dell and HP both declined.

"Psystar is still tilting at legal windmills in its battle against Apple, this time asserting its right to do whatever it wants with products obtained legally from Apple."

And the battle continues! Psystar filed amended paperwork in court stating they had the right to resell the OS X software under the first sale doctrine, since they purchased it legally through Apple and other resellers. The problem with this argument, as outlined in the article, is that the courts (for the most part anyway) have disagreed, saying the first sale doctrine doesn't apply to software. Apple contends that the Mac OS X licensing agreement clearly forbids installation on any non-Apple hardware. I don't know about anyone else, but I have no interest in purchasing a 3rd party machine that just happens to be running OS X on it, I'd rather have a complete unit with hardware built with the software in mind. How about anyone else, any interest in buying from Psystar?

"Apple's iTunes Store is almost completely DRM-free, and will be entirely DRM-free from spring," Nate Lanxon reports for CNET. "This means files downloaded from iTunes work on heaps of devices that aren't from Apple."

Just make sure the music you are now able to share doesn't end up on a file-sharing network, because the DRM-free files contain your email address used when you purchased the music. Maybe this was a payoff to the RIAA, who knows, but it is the one warning in the article. The rest of the article is a pretty good summation of what iTunes Plus means to the average consumer. I love the fact they are doing this, will make my sharing of files (at home only among family of course!) so much easier.

"Mark your calendars: Apple plans to conduct its first-quarter conference call on Wednesday, January 21 at 5 p.m. Eastern (2 p.m. Pacific)."

Via link on the Apple website, you can listen in on the conference call with investors. During the last one, Steve Jobs actually showed up. Apparently this doesn't happen too often, so don't get your hopes up!

"Here's a shocker -- Apple shares slid 0.7 percent (as of this writing) after Phil Schiller concluded the company's last official keyonte address at Macworld Expo. Robert Francello, head of equity trading for Apex Capital hedge fund in San Francisco, blamed "...no true blockbusters" for the market's reaction."

It appears investors were also underwhelmed about the Macworld keynote. I'm with them, I expected more since it was the last time for Apple, here is hoping they will come up with some "knock it out of the park" announcements this year to make up for it!

"Apple Inc. is cutting the price of some songs in its market-leading iTunes online music store to 69 cents and plans to begin selling all tracks without copy protection."

Started over 6 years ago, the iTunes Store has become the go-to place for music. Read more...

"At the Macworld Expo on Tuesday, Apple introduced iLife '09, which features major upgrades to iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand, and includes iDVD and an updated version of iWeb."

This was an expected update, but even so, it offers some cool new features for each part of the iLife '09 package.

Read more...

"Apple released the following statement from CEO Steve Jobs to address the persistent rumors that his health is failing due to his visible weight loss over the last year."

ZDNet posted the complete statement on their blog site, but you can go to Apple.com and read it as well. The rumor that Steve Jobs has been in failing health has been around for a few years at least, along with the photo comparisons, and now it has been put to rest.

Confirmation that someone is having a health crisis is never a good thing, but at least now we can move on from it and wish him a speedy recovery.