Friday, January 9, 2009
Pre Historic: Analysts React to Palm Announcements
Palm’s long-suffering investors have apparently drunk themselves silly on Palm Pre Kool-Aid. Shares of the much diminished handset maker climbed almost seven percent to $4.45 Thursday after the company uncrated the device and Web OS, the new platform it will run on. Wall Street seems convinced that the Pre is not a postscipt for Palm, but the beginnings of its rebirth. A historic turning point worthy of a trading bacchanal.
In its last legal salvo against Psystar, Apple suggested the Mac clone maker was backed by a silent third party or two. And at this point it better be, because there’s going to be hell to pay when Apple legal is through with it, regardless of how Psystar revises its original complaint.
Psystar’s ideological crusade against Apple is fast turning into a boondoggle for the Mac clone maker. On Tuesday, a federal judge dismissed Psystar’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple and with it, one of the company’s last remaining chances to stay in business peddling PCs with Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard preinstalled, an apparent violation of Apple’s software license agreement.
Success, as the old adage claims, has many fathers–even Apple’s success, much as CEO Steve Jobs would like to think otherwise. So it’s interesting to hear that among the progenitors of Apple’s current renown is Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research. Speaking at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles today, Rashid talked up his Apple street cred, reminding attendees that he helped develop Mach, the operating system microkernel that’s now the foundation of Mac OS X.
The media will gather tomorrow at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for an invitation-only event–presumably about updates to its MacBook and MacBook Pro lines. And, as with every Apple product launch, tomorrow’s has been preceded by feverish speculation about what form, exactly, those updates will take. Among the rumors currently making the rounds …
Historically, Apple’s September back-to-school promotion has been a great driver of sales and this year was no exception. According to research outfit Net Applications, Apple’s share of the operating system market rose nearly four-tenths of a percentage point in September, its biggest one-month gain since May.
Holy cow! Despite some very unfortunate stumbles at launch, Apple sold one million iPhone 3Gs in its first three days on the market, according to a company press release this morning.
Microsoft kicked off its annual Tech·Ed conference in Orlando, Fla., this morning–not that anyone’s noticed. And who could blame them, really. The Steve Jobs Show is always a tough act to follow, tougher still when it features a special appearance by
Boy, Apple really sucked all the air out of the news cycle today, eh? First with the announcement of the iPhone 3G and the new features and applications that will accompany it, and now with a handful of details about OS X “Snow Leopard,” a forthcoming upgrade the Mac OS X.
With Apple’s much lauded iPhone having captured about 19.2% of the smart-phone market, expectations were high in advance of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s keynote at the company’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. And Jobs did not disappoint, unveiling the iPhone 3G, which will go on sale July 11 for $199.
