With such pessimism over the US economy, never mind if it’s exaggerated, Apple Inc.’s (Nasdaq: AAPL, stock) needed a stronger steroid than last year’s iPhone announcement to push up its stock price. The fact that the stock price plunged during and after Steve Jobs presentation should be expected. News that Citigroup Inc. had lost nearly $10 billion in the fourth quarter as it wrote down mountains of bad mortgage assets couldn’t come at the better time.
The Wall Street is set for another day of selloff today, Wednesday, after technology leader Intel Corp.’s failure to meet earnings and revenue forecasts for the fourth quarter – worsen by first quarter lower guidance. JPMorgan Chase & Co. might offered a relatively light-weight first-quarter earnings as it took a writedown of $1.3 billion but the bank warned of difficult conditions ahead in 2008. Stocks slide aside let’s see what Apple Inc. offered at its Macworld.
[ 1 ] MacBook Air – I can swear that Steve Jobs stole the idea of “Air” from Nike Inc.’s Air range of shoes to denotes feather-light products. I thought my existing Fujitsu S7000 series notebook was one of the lightest in its range until I saw how “Thinovation” Apple Inc. can be. It’s now officially the world’s thinnest notebook – as thin as your index finger (is yours at 0.8 inches thick?) but packed with:
- 13.3 inch widescreen LED display,
- 1280×800 resolution,
- 2GB RAM, 80GB hard drive,
- 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor,
- built-in iSight camera, only single USB,
- 5-hours battery, 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
However Steve’s imagination might have cost the notebook its DVD drive and a removeable battery. But he argued the new notebook is designed specifically for wireless world (you heard that Streamyx) and if you insists on software installation via DVD or CD (else you’ll throw a grenade at Steve), you can “borrow” the optical drive of a Mac or PC wirelessly via new feature called Remote Disc (hmm, can I borrow money wirelessly?). The notebook is gorgeously priced at $1799 for the above specification. If that’s not enough to blow you off your chair, wait till you hear how you can backup wirelessly.
[ 2 ] Time Capsule – the latest product that could transport you to Enterprise Spaceship or back to the period of Jurassic Period, roughly two-hundreds million years ago. How I wish. It’s actually a backup device that works wirelessly with Time Machine gizmo in Mac OS X Leopard to automatically backup all your data into this piece of, well, Time Capsule. The main attraction is the huge capacity of 500GB or 1TB of disk space to store your valuable data, or 250,000 songs. The speedy 802.11n-connection device is priced at $299 only.
[ 3 ] iPod Touch new Apps – Steve just can’t leave his darling alone without some minor touches, can he? So here you have the new features which you guess it, borrowed from iPhone, such as Mail, Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG, stock)’s Map, Web Clips, Stocks, Weather, Notes and Movies and Music. It’s not free though but is selling for $19.99.
[ 4 ] iPhone Update – still no GPS yet? Hey I thought since you’re talking to Japan’s DoCoMo, you should have it ready, no?
[ 5 ] Apple TV – after the disappointed version 1, this second version of Apple TV looks relatively promising since it no longer requires a computer to pull content off of the Internet and it offers movies in high definition. In an aggressive move, Apple cut the box’s price from $299 to $229 and said existing Apple TV owners could get the new features through a free software upgrade.
[ 6 ] iTunes Movie Rentals – launched a movie rental service at its online iTunes Store partnering six major movie studios to supply content. Rental prices range from $2.99 for library titles, $3.99 for new releases, and $1 extra for high-definition versions. The service which will roll out internationally later this year will work on Macs, Windows-based machines, iPhones, iPods or the Apple TV set-top box.
Although the stock price suffered, longtime Apple watchers say the disappointment won’t last. They justified that ultimately the new lineup will help Apple take fuller advantage of the demand it’s already created among both Mac fans and the swelling ranks of consumers weighing a jump from PCs to the Mac. Furthermore just like music, movies are part of people’s live. Piper Jaffray’s analyst think thin
ks the MacBook Air could become Apple’s best-selling portable, resulting in a 10% increase in the number of Macs sold this year. Time to continue accumulating Apple Inc.’s stock?
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January 16th, 2008 by financetwitter
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