You may not have noticed but Apple's Share price *exploded*.

Apple had a high today (October 14th, 2004) of 45.75 (closed at $44.98), up more than 13% over yesterday and blowing through their previous 52 week high of $ 40.93.

Apple also traded more than 49.5 million shares, about 10x their daily average.

So everyone is asking - how high will it go? Or will it come crashing back to earth soon? What do you think?

Wait....before you answer.....

Let Your Mac Life put our money where your mouth is.

Go to this Forum (you'll have to be a Registered User to see it) and give us your best guess for Apple's Share Price on the close of business on January 10th, 2005 (according to the NASDAQ Web Site), the day before Steve Jobs (presumably) gives the Keynote Address at Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

The person who gets closest without going over will win an iTunes Music Store Gift Certificate in that amount (or whichever certificate is closer).

The kicker is your entry has to be entered in this forum one month ahead of the date - so, by end of the NASDAQ business day on December 10th, 2004.

Apple Share Price Contest

To few people's surprise, the story is (supposedly) coming out on Monday from Wired.com's Leander Kahney (who seemed most taken with the CherryOS).

From Chris O. on the Titanium Mailing list from TheMacintoshGuy.com:
"CherryOS is not only a hoax, Leander Kahney was used as the medium to get the story to Wired.com, and subsequently Slashdot, so a small company named VX30 in Hawaii could stress test a Java based streaming media application they developed.

The CherryOS application turned out to be a rip-off of an open source GPL project called PearPC. What started out as humor from Slashdot may turn into lawsuit from FSF against CherryOS (if the product is ever released).

Leander Kahney will be reporting all the details on Wired.com on Monday."

....for $129.99, according to Amazon's pre-order page!

Apple’s Tiger Coming March 31, 2005

Same old, same old....

Is anyone else getting tired of these ads? I mean, they are the exact.....whoa....wait a minute....

Is that...is it? It is!

Cool!

Spot the difference:
Apple's Front Page Now
Possible New Apple Front Page?

If Apple puts up the new page, what do you think of the new look?

EMC Corp. is close to acquiring backup software provider Dantz Development Corp., to fortify its position in the small to medium-sized business market, the company told SearchStorage.com.

"We are in discussions with Dantz about an acquisition," said Victoria Grey, vice president of strategic initiatives at EMC. "Dantz has complementary technology to our product set and additional channel strength in the SMB market ... It reflects EMC's growth strategy, which includes small to mid-size businesses." The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

(initial indications are this *won't* be a good thing for Mac users. Time will tell)

EMC to Acquire Backup Software Player Dantz

Well, if Ballmer can make a ridiculous statement like, "iPod users are music thieves", and stupidly ignoring how many of his own customers he's just insulted, I feel pretty safe in calling him an embarrassment.

We'll have more on this on Wednesday's show but, for now, our own MacDruid wrote this piece for our forums:

iPod users are music thieves' says Ballmer

Let's see what we can do with this.

"Billing Microsoft as the good guys and Apple the villains of the piece - at least as far as corporate America, rather than users, is concerned, Ballmer said: "We’ve had DRM in Windows for years. The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'."

Is that mp3 you're talking about? If so, then most common format of music on any mp3 player is stolen, not to mention the most common format of music on a hard drive, Windows machines especially, seeing as p2p software on the Mac has lagged behind that for Windows. Nothing like gutting your own customers, eh Ballmer? You do realize that a number of your customers own iPods?

More can be found here.

(Updated with even *more* web sites at the bottom of the story - this is getting ridiculous....)

Is Apple planning a new MP3 Player?

Dow Jones/AP are reporting "SigmaTel stock rose Friday after a Wall Street firm said the semiconductor company will supply chips for a music player from Apple Computer Inc."

Huh?

"Thomas Weisel analyst Jason Pflaum said Apple will use SigmaTel's controller chips for a player it's planning to launch this Christmas."

Wuh?

"....the new player would use solid-state flash memory, which has less capacity but can make for a lighter, cheaper player."

Wow! This is *huge*! If Apple could come out with a physically smaller, cheaper and Flash Memory based MP3 Player, they would be well on their way to "World Domination"!

Yea....right....if only it were believable.

Hey people, I have just come back from Computerland, Gold coast, Australia and they have just got their shipment of the first iMac here. I happend to capture to capture pictures of it, as it arrived on 16th September, 2004 at 1pm (just after lunch via courier).

http://homepage.mac.com/wgill/PhotoAlbum16.html

enjoy
wil

Last night I attended the Apple "Moving the Industry" Keynote at the Okura hotel in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Apple had a small event there for the IBC (http://www.ibc.org/) crowd. The IBC is a major broadcast convention for professionals in Europe. About 1/3 the size of NAB. I'll have a roundup in video soon of the IBC and what was being shown, and what was announced by Apple. Here are some highlights:

At the "Moving Sound, Moving Video, Moving the Industry" presentation Apple announced that the next Final Cut Pro release will be supporting a number of formats greatly awaited by the European market. FCP will be compatible with 1080i50 HD format. This is an important announcement for the European video market. It basically means that Apple will be supporting the various HD PAL formats, which haven't been fully supported up until now.

Another announcement is that FCP will support the Sony MPEG IMX format. This is important as the Sony MPEG IMX format is quickly becoming the standard here in Europe. For some reason Sony has been able to muscle Panasonic out of the market on the SD and HD standard. By next year all broadcast files will no longer be given on tape in Holland but as MPEG IMX files (if memory serves me correctly, but I'll let the YML viewers know how this is progressing).

The HDV-standard from JVC will be supported as well as Panasonics P2 format series. More information on the P2 series of tapes, cameras and players can be found here: https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pro-av/sales_o/p2/index.html

Those were the major announcements in the Keynote. For the rest we were given a demonstration of Motion, the same that was given at the NAB and Paris Expos. We were shown DVD Studio Pro, and shown the ineropreabiltiy between the Production Suite Programs in a demo. Nothing new for those of us that are Apple Video Pro's. There were some announcements about XSAN and XSERVE coming out soon. From what I hear though from some Apple rep's is that this is still in Beta. MTV Europe is using it at the moment and testing it, but it really isn't as airtight as it should be for enterprise market. SAN technology needs to be fail safe for the enterprise market it's being sold too, becuase we're talking about a problem costing lots of money if anything goes wrong. We'll see if Apple does deliver this on time.

Hobnobbing after the keynote at the Okura bar, talking to a number of other Video Professionals from Ireland, England, and some Apple reps, the main topic of discussion: Not motion, not XSAN. You guessed it, getting products! It seems everyone is complaining about the pour operations in distribution that Apple has at the moment. And when the guys that are ordering 20 G5's production suites start complaining, you know there are problems.

Unoffically though, they've got everything for the G5's; hardisks, cases, memory, etc. They just don't have any processors from IBM yet.
Another unofficial bit of news I heard between free wine glasses from another Apple rep, there are 500,000 iPod 4Gs on backorder. Mine is probably among them.
Let's see if Apple can get things fixed before the Holiday season. I hope so for Jay's Apple stock they do.
So that's a quick review for now. I'll have some video footatge up this week for everyone who wasn't able to go.

Gabe Mac from www.whisper-media.com