(Asymco)
Asymco's Horace Dediu reports that he expects Apple to have over $70 billion in cash at the end of its second quarter; with it, the company could conceivably acquire every single one of its mobile phone competitors except Samsung (which is valued at a slightly more modest $53 billion). While I'm sure Apple would love to buy up these companies and get its hands on , perhaps we're guilty of not thinking big enough. Apple's waited this long; why not wait a few more quarters and store up the full $120 billion it would take to buy smart phone competitor on the planet? They'll never see it coming.
(FOSS Patents)
Speaking of competitors, Apple's took another step forward on Friday, as the company rephrased its complaint to insert more assertive language, accusing Samsung of "slavishly copying" Cupertino's iPhone and iPad line. Several new devices have been added to the list of infringing products as well, including the Droid Charge, Exhibit 4G, Galaxy Ace, Galaxy Prevail, Galaxy S, Gravity, Infuse 4G, Nexus S 4G, Replenish, Sidekick, Galaxy Tab 10.1, and Galaxy S II. When we called Samsung for comment, we got stuck on hold for hours, listening to a bootleg recording of Apple's voicemail system.
(AppleInsider)
Why isn't Apple releasing any new hardware right now? According to a source who spoke to AppleInsider on Thursday, it's all Lion's fault. Apple executives have reportedly made the decision to give customers the "latest and greatest Apple experience"--namely Macs running Lion--rather than having to explain why shiny new models aren't shipping with the very latest Mac experience preinstalled. Having worked at an Apple Store after an upgrade cycle and dealt with more than my fair share of complaining customers, you know what I call that?
(The Mac Observer)
Quicken 2007, dead in Lion? Maybe not. Mac Observer CEO Dave Hamilton took the time on Thursday to chat with Intuit VP Aaron Patzer about the aging PowerPC application. As-written, Quicken would not be able to run on the next version of Mac OS X thanks to the elimination of the Rosetta emulator; however, according to Patzer, Intuit is working with Apple to license the Rosetta libraries and embed them into Quicken 2007, so that users could still theoretically still use the program after an upgrade to Lion. While I don't personally see the appeal in patching together an old application, I suppose old habits die hard. On the bright side, at least no one's . (Yet.)
- This update to Apple's Logic Studio application improves stability and fixes an issue where Audio Unit plugin presets were incorrectly displayed, where incoming MIDI sounds were forced to channel 1, and patches a problem that could cause the program to quit when using Undo after deleting a patch. Free for all MainStage users running OS X 10.5.8 or later.