AAPL now below $120

AAPL's wild ride continues. With all the uncertainty in the market, everyone (except me) is pulling their money out of the market. Today, AAPL dropped below $120. This is not just about the greater market, however. Investors didn't like the downgrades to AAPL by RBC and (the beleaguered) Morgan Stanley, to $140 and $115 (ouch) respectively.

AAPL is currently down over $10, trading at $117 and change.

[Update 2008-09-29]

As of a few minutes ago, AAPL hit $109. Impressive drop, especially considering that the rest of the tech sector seems to be holding on with only mild drops.

[Update 2008-09-29]

After Congress rejected the bailout bill, AAPL briefly touched the $100 (plus change) level today, and closed just over $105, down nearly 18%. Maybe it's time to buy again soon. Or not.

Laminar Research confirms Apple's ad placements in movies

We've always suspected that Apple actively pushes its hardware through strategic TV show and movie placements, but it's nice to finally get confirmation from an insider. (No, so many Macs are not in movies just because all the directors think they look good.) Laminar Research (the X-Plane guys) confirms that Apple keeps stashes of its hardware in storage specifically for this purpose:

When we need a bigger monitor to do the ARTWORK for the iPhone version of X-Plane (for example), all we would do is say the word and huge cases full of Quad-Core desktops and 30-inch monitors were rolled into our office. Why the huge cases to hold this stuff? As it turns out, we were given the SAME computers that are shipped off to Hollywood to appear in movies! Apple has a reserve of the latest and coolest hardware to appear in movies, and they lent THOSE computers to us to do the X-Plane for iPhone development.

By the way, their description of their time at Apple (including the above quote) has disappeared from their site. I guess Mr. Jobs didn't enjoy seeing his company's secrets all over the web.

iPhone 2.1 kills 3rd party AV cable support for 3G

Recently I purchased a third party composite AV cable to use with my iPhone 3G, so I could watch my DVDs encoded with Handbrake while on the road, without having to take the DVDs with me. The cable worked perfectly, and the video quality was actually quite good on small to mid-sized TVs despite the fact that the source was composite video. The reasonable quality was likely because I use relatively high bitrate H.264, at over 2 Mbps for the video alone.

That all changed with iPhone 2.1. After the update, the cable no longer works. Apple has now locked out that cable. Well, not completely. The cable still does work at times, for about 10 seconds, before kicking us back out of the video. It's almost as if Apple is teasing us.


According to reports, iPhone 2.0 also removed compatibility of other 3rd party cables for owners of the original iPhone. Those cables worked perfectly with iPhone 1.1.4, but suddenly stopped working with 2.0.

Conveniently, Apple sells its own AV cables which are endowed with authentication chips . Sorry Apple, I'm not interested. $49 is simply horrendously overpriced, even if it does include an AC USB adapter (that I don't want). Maybe if I can find it cheaper I'll bite, but not at this outrageous price... especially when the $10 cable I had worked absolutely perfectly before.

AAPL's wild ride - Summer 2008

AAPL has been down in the dumps of late, along with the greater market. Having sold at $167 months ago, I vowed to wait until it got back into the $120s before I bought back in. It then proceeded to get to about $190 before a pull back, and then again to $180 before starting on a sharp decline.

I decided to buy back in on Wednesday, right in the middle of all the market crash chaos. I bought at a then low price of $131.87, thinking my prediction of $125ish might not materialize. Of course, the falling knife got me, and another 11 bucks was shaved off the price the next day, a drop of 8.5% to $120.68. However, just before close the market rallied, and AAPL ended the day at $134.09 with an intraday high of well over $135. That was a remarkable show of volatility, with 55 million shares changing hands too.

Now at 9 am on Friday premarket, AAPL is sitting pretty at $143.36, over 9% higher than yesterday's close. Let's see if she can hold that value, and then some.

[Update]

AAPL closed at $140.91, for a gain of more than 5% for the day.

iTunes 8 HD video - Requires Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz

Apple's new iTunes 8 has hefty requirements. If you want to watch iTunes HD on a Mac (or a PC), you need at least a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU. That means that all Mac minis except for the latest top of the line model are excluded. In fact, Apple's entry level Mac mini being sold now doesn't even meet these requirements. Some older MacBooks, Intel iMacs, and even some MacBook Pros don't meet the requirements either.

Fortunately, I sold my old 2.0 GHz Core Duo MacBook (not Core 2 Duo) last month. I am using a G4 800 iBook for the time being. I'll probably buy a new MacBook in 2009, but I won't rule out buying a new one in 2008 should Apple release a super-duper new model this year.

Let's Rock - a letdown, but Jobs still alive

Apple's "Let's Rock" media event was a rare misfire for Apple. The press seemed universally underwhelmed by the event, as predicted by analysts.

Apple released a bunch of new iPods (including a volume button-endowed iPod touch... finally), iTunes 8 with HD media (including from NBC), ear canal headphones, and not much else. The markets were pretty much indifferent to the announcement. Yesterday AAPL dropped in anticipation of the event, the opposite direction of the general market. Today AAPL fell in-line with the greater market, and closed at 151.68, down almost 4%.

There was one highlight to the event however, and that was Jobs' succinct statement about his health: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." Bloomberg's obituary for Jobs was just a little premature.