iPhone4idiots

Here we go again. CNet reported that Apple will release an iPad Mini this Fall. Speficially, that six million units are being prepared that will sell for $249 to $299. I still say not going to happen for the reasons I mentioned back in February. I keep reading that the Kindle Fire sold so well that Apple is going after that market. Really, how many has Amazon sold? Amazon seems quiet on that number. Are they over 10 million yet? I kind of hope it does happen even though that would make me wrong. How would it look. No way it could have a retina display at that price. What would be the quality of the cameras? Yeah, I really just don’t see it happening.

Today Apple said it will initiate a regular quarterly dividend of $2.65 a share in July and will buy back up to $10 billion of its stock starting in fiscal 2013. This will use about $45 billion of their approximate $100 billion in cash. This is a horrible idea. First, as @tapbot_paul smartly stated, “when I hear dividend I think of my taxes going up due to the extra income and the stock I own going down.” More importantly, Steve Jobs would never have let this happen. He was too smart and could tell everybody else no. Tim is just doing what the board wants. The stock just opened at $595. Any day traders should short here with a stop loss at $603.

ABC Nightline aired a report Tuesday night taking a look at “iFactory: Inside Apple”. Apple granted them access to the Foxconn plant in China that employs approximately 500,000. There has been some press recently about poor working conditions. The report focused on long hours, depression, suicide netting around all buildings and fact the workers can’t even afford one iPad. While this is just temporary bad press that’s been covered before the recent Chinese court rulings are more worrisome for Apple. Continue Reading…

Apple today announced iBooks 2 for the iPad, which will include Textbooks. Textbooks will focus on high-quality interactive content for students. Interesting Apple also announced iBooks Author for the Mac that will allow teachers and publishers to create ebooks. Let the publishers create the ebooks and Apple will just take their cut. So before Apple held it’s education conference today I was hoping for one thing. Get rid of textbooks in schools. I hear college textbooks are about $200 each. That’s almost $1000 per semester on books! Apple could give iPads to incoming Freshman for free and make money by the end of the first year by getting rid of this racket. A textbook download would surely be half the price. Not to mention when there is an update the old textbooks don’t become useless. It’s just an update, not a new tree killing press run. Taking notes or highlighting on your iPad pages is now simple to do. Not to mention carrying around one iPad as opposed to three or four textbooks. It just makes too much sense. The author still makes money, the publisher’s still get paid, the student pays less and Apple makes a killing as well. It’s good for Apple, it’s good for students, it’s good for whatever universities are smart enough to be early adopters. The only losers are textbook makers and those companies that deal with buying and selling of old textbooks. Frankly, they deserve to die. The other losers are Apple’s competition. Despite it’s massive purchasing power, how much longer can Amazon buy books wholesale and compete in a digital world? Also, poor Microsoft. There will be no windows version of iBooks and I’m sure their market share in the university and college world will disappear over the next decade. Somewhere up there I think Steve Jobs is smiling.

So Apptrackr and associated Cydia app Installous have been under attack from Apple recently. For those that don’t know, they have been the main website and app to download cracked apps. Cracked apps being App Store apps that cost money that you can download for free. It’s the main reason people jailbreak their iOS devices. For anyone that has used either Apptrackr or Installous you surely have noticed that over the past few months a ton of the links no longer work. This never used to be the case and their blog recently explained that Apple has been sending takedown notices for a “ton” of their content. The only way to slow this process down is to add CAPTCHA to their links, something they recently stared doing. In addition they moved their servers to “several different countries” and the extra expense has lead them to place advertisements on that CAPTCHA page. So for those that have noticed these changes that’s what’s happening. My thoughts on this. Continue Reading…

Happy New Year! Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the support and let you know I’m in Atlanta bringing in 2012. Thus, no updating requests for a few days. Will get caught up when I’m back in Nashville. Next year should be another super one for Apple. The iPad 3 will be here with a higher resolution display in about 75 days! Can’t wait to own one. Even better, there is a great chance the iPhone 5 will support 4G LTE. That is assuming Apple can figure out how to retain the superb battery life their current iPhones enjoy. Apple will also take a stab at selling televisions. We’ll take a wait and see approach on whether or not they are worth buying. Time to drink some alcohol before shooting off large amounts of fireworks in a residential neighborhood. Gotta love the South!

So if you read this website? Blog? Whatever it is you might know in a former life I followed stocks for a living. You also may have read previous posts about shorting RIMM (the crapberry maker) and using the money to buy AAPL (the ticker symbol for Apple stock). I said to short Netflix the day they raised prices. It feels good to be on a roll. So, I’m trying to find the next big thing to short and Groupon might be it. Did you know Groupon went public today? I know a lot of iPhone peeps use and love Groupon. It’s even bigger I think on Facebook. Continue Reading…

Well I was wrong about Apple releasing iTunes Match over the weekend. Apple stated it would begin in October and missed the deadline. I think this is probably a good thing for the consumer. It obviously wasn’t ready as most those I follow that were testing it said it was slow and didn’t match nearly a high enough percentage of songs. Apple would be smart to get it right before rolling it out. They made the mistake of launching an immature product with their horrible Cards app which I reviewed here. Don’t make the same mistake again. iTunes Match is coming for sure, it’s just a question of when (remember the delays in the white iPhone!).

Looks like iTunes Match launches this weekend. Those beta testing the music matching service have been told by Apple that iTunes is deleting the libraries today. The likely last step before it goes live. I expect that this weekend. What iTunes Match does is for $25 per year iTunes will scan your music library and match songs with Apple’s own library and then upload the rest of the songs it does not recognize. This makes all your music available on all your iOS devices. It also turns any music you downloaded thorough other means into a legal high quality copy. Anyone planning on using this service?
UPDATE 10/30 – Looks like it’s not happening this weekend. Since Apple said it would go live in October that can only mean one thing. Numerous beta testers have stated the service is slow and only matches about half the songs. It’s still not ready.

So you may have read or seen that Siri enables anyone to pick up your iPhone and make a call even if you have the passcode lock on. All you have to do is hit the home button to activate Siri and tell her to make a call. She’s your girl. She’ll do it! This was discovered a few days ago and Mashable just picked it up today. You should read more about this soon. The fix is simple. Goto Settings – General – Passcode Lock – and turning Siri (Allow access to Siri when locked with a passcode.) off. Why this isn’t set to off by default I have no idea? My friends don’t keep up with iPhone news. I’m totally gonna pick up my buddies iPhone when he goes to the toilet, loo, potty and say, “Call”. When Siri answer’s depending on my mood I’ll try “girlfriend”, “mom”, “work”. Let me know in the comments what you think.