Portland Apple Store
Made it to Portland, Oregon for a weekend trip. Happy birthday, America!
Of course I had to stop by the Apple store at Pioneer Square. About to shop for iMacs, old-school iPhones (if I can find them), and enjoy the friendly atmosphere.
The madness continues, but us AAPL investors have to be feeling better than we were just a few months ago.
Conventional wisdom says buy on the rumor, and sure enough – after the iPhone 3G announcement, AAPL stock took a bit of a dive. It’s been bouncing back and forth (with the markets, apparently, in red and orange above), now resting at $173 as of today’s closing.
Apple is in good condition, and with the iPhone price drop, I can only imagine things will get better. And others agree (including a blogger I read regularly over at The Simple Dollar). The final pricing point doesn’t matter. What’ll be interesting is to see how the stock performs come July 11, when lines outside Apple stores will surely beat last year’s. I hope to be at our own Ann Arbor store that morning. If it’s anything like the store’s opening, it should be a fun day, indeed.
For all the speculation and gambling and non-news that gets thrown around in regards to Apple, what matters most is the ability of the company to churn out high-quality computers and phones and music players that people want. And they are doing that.
If, as king-hell capitalists believe, a company’s stock price is the true measure of its worth, than Apple is in good condition. Says one analyst (thanks to Reuters):
Analyst David Bailey also raised his target on the stock to $220 from $185, and said Apple should be able to increase its available iPhone subscriber base by more than 80 percent this year due to aggressive expansion into international markets.
Will all that optimism change should that Jobs guy leave the company?
Who can tell? The experiment marches on, anyway.
I always wonder about the Mac Mini.
Every time I see one I want to touch it, and I’m always on the look-out for a cheap enough model to buy. But I wonder how the Mac Mini’s sales are doing.
When it was launched, people predicted the Mini – then a G4 – would sell pretty well. Then, last summer, sites predicted the death of the Mini. Since Leopard was release, the Mini just hangs in limbo.
It’s a shame, too, because people love the pint-sized Mac enough to mod the heck out of it. Media centers, car computers – you name it, someone has put a Mini inside it. But how well does it sell overall?
The original idea was to offer up a below-$1,000 Mac so that Window users, who already own a capable monitor and keyboard/mouse set, could jump ship easily and cheaply. The Mini could run OS X and MS Office software and anything else you could throw at it, and users could expect a machine to help them “learn” the Mac OS without whipping through 40 Photoshop filters at top speed. You knew it was a modest system. You didn’t expect a whole lot.
As it stands today, though, people are switching to Apple – but mostly through the notebook route. What’s the Mac Mini’s role in all this? A new MobileMe-only device? A music server?
Plus, OS X 10.5 requires more powerful hardware, and the Mini’s modest specs seem to not up to the new iMac’s standards, I guess I’m just worried the tiny Mac will get lost in the (non-iPod) shuffle. If sales are sluggish, would Apple just drop it? Would the monitor-less experiment be over? And what about the dreaded xMac?
If anyone knows, I’d love to hear about it.
I’m a public relations professional by day, and I’ve got to tell you: I admire the way Apple gets all the headlines for their events.
I noticed this Monday when my iGoogle pops up and the WWDC 2008 buzz was everywhere to be found (above). Apple’s PR juggernaut can’t be stopped, even when Steve Jobs is looking under the weather.
One goal of public relations is to get your message out and to communicate with your “publics” (shareholders, employees, customers, etc.). Another is to get “inches” out of the new press, which amounts to free advertising. Apple does this without batting an eye. Oh, to be a PR pro in the Cupertino halls.
Do you know how hard it is to stare at this and wait for Apple to upload their Quicktime video of the WWDC 08 keynote?
Do you?
I told myself: no checking the blogs, no checking the live feeds. Wait until you get home and watch the keynote via Apple’s Quicktime upload. That way, you’re watching it unfold like everyone who was there.
But no. No video uploaded yet as of 5:42 p.m. Eastern time Monday night.
C’mon…
Something along the lines of what the Cult of Mac guys are thinking: that the 3G iPhone will just be a warm-up.
It’s kind of like right before last year, when the iPhone was first announced. The buzz was feverishly high. Remember that? And all those mockups and predictions came across the blogs, and everyone was going nuts.
Then Steve Jobs gave the demo, and it was better than anybody came close to imagining.
I think WWDC on June 9 will be just like that. All this hyper-excitement over the new iPhone (and well-deserved, I might mention), when all this time Jobs and his crew are planning something that blows us all away. As usual.
Daring Fireball did some digging on something called “Mobile Me,” and I think that might be the key everyone is ignoring (except Gruber, of course). But who knows? No one but a few Apple employees.
So a week from now, I have a feeling we’ll all have something new and exciting to talk about besides a 3G iPhone.
That’s all I got.
For a guy that was no fan of social networking sites Myspace or Facebook – or computers in general, once upon a time – Brian Floe sure thinks along those lines.
Floe is the creator of MyAppleSpace.com, a growing social site dedicated to Apple fans.
Why not just create a “Mac Lovers” group on Facebook?
“Why not just buy a PC and put an Apple sticker on it?” Floe says. “Mac users especially always want the next big thing, not the second best thing. We have high standards.”
Good point. That’s why Floe says MyAppleSpace is “a little space for the rest of us.”
Made it home safe and sound from my big New England driving trip, and had a chance to stop at the 5th Ave Apple Store in NYC.
It was great, lots of fun, but I opted not to take the Newton because I didn’t want one more thing to drag around with me. My car was packed enough.
It was bound to happen. Now there’s a social networking site – like Myspace or Facebook – dedicated to Apple users.
It’s called MyAppleSpace, and according to Brian Floe, it’s the networking site “for the rest of us”:
iPhone, iPod, Mac or even AppleTV users now have a common home to explore the everything Apple, share experiences, network with other users, create usergroups within the community, create their own profile with their own private blog, upload Apple related video, photos and even music.
MyAppleSpace is pretty simple to start out. It has some customization features (my profile is “Bondi”) and the ability to comment and blog and share videos. All pretty standard stuff. I created a group called “Newton Users” (nach), and it was a snap. Now we’ll see if anyone joins.
Because that’s the power of social networks: the bigger, the better. But an Apple-themed site can stay just small enough to be comfy and familiar.
Check it out, and join my Newton group. I’ll see you on MyAppleSpace.
[UPDATE: Read my interview with MyAppleSpace creator Brian Flow.]
Like it hasn’t happened before, right?
This time, our green friend made Wired.com’s “Lamest Fetish Items” list. Gear lust gone bad? Says Wired: “Most misunderstood gadget ever? Or biggest flop? Both.”
Flop this. Newton seems to appear on every list ever made by a technology-based site, for good or ill.
Enough’s enough already, folks. We know the MessagePad was both cool for the time and a big commercial flop. We get it.
Happy Memorial Day.