Asked earlier this year if he would resign from Apple’s board in the face of Federal Trade Commission scrutiny of the close ties between the two companies’ boards of directors, Google CEO Eric Schmidt replied simply, “It hasn’t crossed my mind.” Well, apparently it has now.
Demand for Apple’s iPhone 3GS, which topped one million handsets sold in its first weekend at market, has surpassed even the company’s presumably aggressive targets. Reporting earnings Tuesday, Apple said it sold 5.2 million iPhones in its third quarter and finally copped to something that’s long been apparent to anyone who’s been keeping an eye on its iPhone availability widget: Demand for the new iPhone 3GS is far outpacing supply.
The economy is in recession, consumer spending is down and the PC market is in the worst decline since the Great Dark Times of 2001. And Apple is doing just fine. After market close Tuesday, the company reported earnings that crushed the Street’s estimates into a fine iPod-white dust. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters estimated that Apple would earn $1.16 per share on $8.16 billion in sales. Instead, it earned $1.35 on $8.34 billion for a profit of $1.23 billion.
“I spot Steve chatting with Dave Holmes outside the dressing room and suddenly feel like a star-struck teenager. In order to get the gall up to speak to the guy, I down a double espresso. The mixture of caffeine buzz and feeling like a cheesy little fanboy means that all I can manage to say to him is ‘Thank you so much.’”
– A Coldplay roadie spots Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the band’s show in Mountain View this week
When it launched on July 10, 2008, Apple’s iTunes App Store included 552 apps. Today, the App Store boasts more than 65,000. And in a celebratory press release issued this morning, Apple tells us they’ve been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times in its first year of business.
So that mysterious touch tablet Apple’s rumored to be developing? It’s about to go into production in advance of an October launch date. This according to a report in the Information Times, which claims that three of Apple’s manufacturing partners–Foxconn, Wintek and Dynapack–have received orders from Apple that suggest the company is building a “netbook” with a 9.7-inch touchscreen.
Google chief Eric Schmidt has some words of advice for outsiders insisting he should recuse himself from Apple’s board of directors following the unveiling of Chrome OS, an operating system that will presumably compete with Apple’s Mac OS X: You can have my Apple board seat when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
What happened between Apple’s January 5 disclosure of Steve Jobs’s “hormonal imbalance” and the company’s January 14 announcement that the CEO would be taking a six-month leave of absence? That’s the focus of an ongoing Securities and Exchange Commission probe into Steve Jobs’s health, an investigation that seems to, well, be going nowhere.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has officially returned to work after a six-month medical leave. “Steve Jobs is back to work,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling told Digital Daily, confirming what many in Silicon Valley began to suspect last week after Jobs popped up in a company press release.
“If I have any serious illness, or something coming up of an important nature, an operation or anything like that, I think the thing to do is just tell the…the Berkshire shareholders about it. I work for ‘em. Some people might think I’m important to the company. Certainly Steve Jobs is important to Apple. So it’s a material fact. Whether he is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact. Whether I’m facing serious surgery is a material fact. Whether (General Electric CEO) Jeff Immelt is, I mean, so I think that’s important to get out. They’re going to find out about it anyway so I don’t see a big privacy issue or anything of the sort.”
– Warren Buffett says Apple has been too secretive about CEO Steve Jobs’s health issues
Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently underwent a liver transplant and “has an excellent prognosis,” a Memphis, Tenn., hospital has confirmed. In a statement issued late Tuesday, Dr. James D. Eason, the chief of transplantation at Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute, said that Jobs did in fact receive a new liver at his transplant facility and is now recovering well.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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