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Video: The last time Steve Jobs came back to Apple
To celebrate Steve Jobs' official return to Apple (AAPL) this week, Kobi Shely has posted a YouTube clip from MacHEADS, his 54-minute "fanboy documentary" on the cult surrounding the company and its charismatic CEO.
Shely wrote, directed, co-produced and edited the film. The 2-minute 22-second segment he selected is centered around the return of Jobs to Apple in Dec. 1996 after he was ousted in a boardroom coup nearly a dozen years earlier.
The clip includes rare footage from the July 1998 keynote in which a younger, chubbier Jobs announces Apple's return to profitability and introduces the first iMac.
Nielsen: Apple is tops for hardware buzz
Here's an interesting measure of how effectively Apple (AAPL) can whip the tech world into a frenzy — even without Steve Jobs there to stir things up.
According to a report issued Monday by Nielsen Online, "anticipatory buzz" in May drew more than 55.7 million unique visitors to Apple's website — more than double that of Hewlett Packard (HPQ) and 25 times the site for Microsoft's (MSFT) Xbox.
The buzz got even louder in June with the unveiling of the iPhone 3GS. At one point between June 8 and June 9, nearly 0.6% of the nearly 100 million blogs, groups, boards, social networks and other consumer generated media that Nielsen tracks were talking about the new device. According to the report:
Apple: 'Steve Jobs is back to work'
Technology's most closely watched chief executive is officially back on the job, according to an Apple (AAPL) spokesman.
“Steve Jobs is back to work," chief spokesperson Steve Dowling told CNN.com. "He is at Apple a few days a week and working from home the other days. We’re glad to have him back.”
Jobs, who is recovering from two major surgeries — one to remove a tumor from his pancreas nearly five years ago, the second a transplant performed two months ago to treat end-stage liver disease — was scheduled to return from a six-month leave of absence before the end of June.
MacBook back on top at Amazon
In a sign that should bode well for Apple's (AAPL) earnings in its third fiscal quarter — which ended Saturday — the MacBook has clawed its way back to the top of Amazon's (AMZN) bestseller lists.
The Mac, which once led the pack in the online retailer's Computers & PC Hardware Bestsellers category despite its $1,000 to $2,000 sticker prices, had fallen behind the blistering sales pace set by netbooks like the Asus Eee and the Acer Aspire One, which sell in the $300 to $400 range.
By June 1, the bestselling Apple computer on the list — a white plastic MacBook — had been pushed down to the No. 14 position.
But netbooks have started to fall out favor recently — as witnessed by reports of return rates as high as 30% and an NPD study that found that 60% of consumers who bought them didn't understand the difference between a netbook and a notebook.
Meanwhile, Apple announced on June 8 that it was refreshing its notebook line and lowering its prices. Result: its computers have become hot sellers on Amazon once again.
Apple's entry-level 13-inch unibody MacBook, renamed the MacBook Pro, has been one of Amazon's top 100 bestsellers for 20 days — basically since the moment it went on sale. As of Monday morning, it was the site's No. 4 bestselling computer overall and No. 1 in the laptop category.
In fact, three of the top 10 and five of the top 20 bestselling laptops on Amazon are now MacBooks.
Apple is not the only beneficiary of what some see as growing consumer disillusion with netbooks. HP (HPQ) Pavilions, Toshiba Satellites and Samsung Mini Notebooks are also selling briskly online.
See also:
Apple runs short of iPhones
The iPhone availability widget is back — new and improved — and it's showing spot shortages of selected iPhones at Apple (AAPL) stores across the United States.
The availability tool, which appears on Apple's website in times of scarcity, was last seen in the summer of 2008, when demand for the iPhone 3G was heavy and supplies short.
When it reappeared on Friday, only 29 of Apple's 257 stores were displaying shortages of any iPhones, according to IFOAppleStore, a website that keeps close tabs of Apple's retail business.
By Sunday morning, however, there were red "sold out" lights for selected 3GS models in all but six states.
Michael Jackson, Steve Jobs and Apple's share price
As I see it, Apple's crack public relations team stage-managed the news last week of Steve Jobs' liver transplant pretty well on its own, somehow making it appear in the Wall Street Journal after the markets had closed for the weekend and in the middle of what was probably the company's biggest product release of the year.
By the time Monday rolled around and traders could react to the fact that what Jobs had initially described as a hormone imbalance was actually end stage liver disease, Apple was able to soften the blow with the news that it had just sold 1 million new iPhones.
The stock took a 3.9% hit — dropping from 139.48 to 134.01 in the space of two days. But by then Jobs had been spotted back on Apple's Cupertino campus walking on his own — without cane or wheelchair — and his surgical team had declared that he was "recovering well" with an "excellent prognosis."
But there's nothing to help you forget the illness of one celebrity like the passing of an ever bigger one, and when Michael Jackson died on Thursday, all bets were off. The flood of searches on Jackson's name just before 3 p.m. PDT (6 p.m. EDT) was so abrupt and intense that at first Google thought it was under attack.
Meanwhile, interest in Steve Jobs, as gauged by Google Insights, flatlined, and pressure on Apple's shares lifted. Whoever was shorting Apple (AAPL), it seems, had moved on to better things.
The stock closed Friday at 142.44, higher by 2.52 points than it opened on Monday.
See also:
- Steve Jobs, the sickest patient on the waiting list
- Inside Steve Jobs' liver transplant
- Steve Jobs: Apple sold 1 million new iPhones
- Steve Jobs is back at Apple
Michael Jackson photo: Rusty Kennedy/Associated Press; Steve Jobs photo: Getty Images
The rise and fall of the iPhone peep show
"Sex is everywhere these days," we wrote in an article that nearly ended our career 14 years ago. "There's something about the combination of sex and computers, however, that seems to make otherwise worldly-wise adults a little crazy."
How else to explain the fuss that got made this week over an application called Hottest Girls that enjoyed a brief moment of notoriety — and an even briefer run as one of the hottest entries in the iTunes App Store.
In case you missed it, the story started late Wednesday night when sharp-eyed Apple watchers at Macenstein reported that the $1.99 app, which until that day had served up mostly photographs of young Asian women in lingerie, had changed its format and gone topless.
"And then there was porn," wrote Dr. Macenstein in a post illustrated by a heavily Bowdlerized screengrab of what looked like outtakes from a Sports Illustrated bikini issue. He described the unveiling of the first iPhone app with nudity as "an announcement rivaling the first transmissions from the moon landing in importance."
Never mind that photos like this would hardly turn a head on the magazine racks of Paris — or, for that matter, your average American truck stop — this story had more than bare breasts. It had legs.
iPhone share of U.S. smartphone traffic hits 69%
See the blue slice in the pie chart at right? It represents the iPhone's share of U.S. smartphone traffic on the network maintained by AdMob, one of the companies that run those little ads that appear on the screen of your mobile phone.
We've been watching that slice grow over the past few months. In February it covered 51% of the pie. By April it had grown to 59%. And by Thursday morning, when AdMob released the May edition of its U.S. smartphone pie, Apple's (AAPL) share had grown to 69% — a 10 point increase in one month.
Some caveats are in order. This is just one company's view of the mobile Web — albeit the view of world's largest supplier of mobile ads, serving 6.3 billion banner and text ads per month. And it's only a snapshot of the smartphones on the U.S. portion of the AdMob network — although 47.6% of AdMob's traffic comes from the U.S. and 37.3% of that comes from smartphones.
Still, what it suggests is that Apple's domination of the smartphone market — the only part of the cellphone market that has continued to grow in the face of the recession, according to Gartner Research — is accelerating.
How tough this makes it for the competition is even clearer when you look at AdMob's report on the total U.S. handset market — one that includes smartphones, so-called feature phones and devices that aren't phones at all, like the iPod touch. Apple's share of this market, viewed through AdMob requests, is 45.1%, having grown 10.4% between April and May. Most of the other players in the field — including Research in Motion (RIMM), Samsung, Motorola (MOT) and Palm (PALM) — are showing negative growth. We'll be watching next month to see if Palm's share grows once AdMob starts to get data from the Pre.
Below the fold: AdMob's worldwide data, in which Apple's share (31.4%) and share change (5.2%) are smaller, but the pattern is basically the same. You can see the full report here.
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Analyst: Palm has sold 150,000 Pres
With Palm's (PALM) quarterly earnings due Thursday — along with Jon Rubinstein's debut performance as CEO — analysts have started to place their bets on what the quarter will show.
First out of the box — or at least, first in our inbox — is RBC Capital's Mike Abramsky, who expects investors to look past soft fourth-quarter results and focus on the potential for growth in the next fiscal year.
Specifically, his report to clients reports …
