Here is your daily Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) stock news and rumors for September 15, 2010. AAPL may have started to meet demand for the iPad but with the holiday season coming up, they may need to ramp up production in a big way. Speaking of the iPad, video game developer Epic Games will bring their widely licensed Unreal 3 Engine to Apple’s mobile platforms in the near future. With all these iPad developments, it’s not surprising that one analyst is predicting that the device will replace the Mac as Apple’s second biggest earner by 2012.
APPL Ups iPad Production With New Touch Panel Sensor Provider: Some analysts have predicted that Apple Inc. will sell 28 million iPads by the end of 2011. That is a whole lot of iPads for a company who only just started to manufacture enough of the machines to meet demand. In the interests of reaching that lofty sales goal, Apple has brought on the Taiwanese AU Optronics (NYSE: AUO) subsidiary Cando as an additional supplier of touch panel sensors for the famous tablet computer. A report at DigiTimes says that Cando will begin producing nearly one million of the touch panels per month and will begin production either this month or next. Cando recently opened a new factory specifically for the manufacture of iPad parts. They join LG Electronics (LSE: LGLD), who has had a lot of trouble keeping up with the massive demand for iPads in the 19 countries they’re sold, as manufacturer of these unique parts for APPL.
Gears of War Creators Release Development Kit for iPad, iPhone 4, and iPod Touch: Epic Games, the independently owned developer behind the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Gears of War franchise and the widely licensed Unreal Engine game development platform, has announced that its Unreal Engine 3 tool kit will support Apple’s mobile operating system iOS in the near future. Epic vice president Mark Rein made the announcement at the Korean Games Conference, just weeks after unveiling the graphically impressive Epic Citadel tech demo at Apple’s September 1 media event in San Francisco. The Unreal 3 game development engine has been licensed by many of the game industries biggest publishers, from Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS) to Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ: ATVI). The introduction of the tools to Apple’s mobile devices means that they can be leveraged as one more platform for those publishers major franchises, like Activision’s Transformers series.
iPad to Replace Mac as AAPL’s #2 Revenue Stream by 2012: Independent Apple Inc. sales data analyst Daniel Tello has put together a new graph laying out the history and growth potential of Apple’s various revenue streams. While he predicts that the iPhone will remain the company’s strongest earner, as it has been since 2009, he believes the iPad will replace the company’s line of Mac computers as its second highest earning product. His analysis is based on the iPad’s sales in Apple’s second quarter, as well as projected sales for the third and fourth. While it doesn’t account for the introduction of a major competitor to Apple’s device that may slow sales, it’s a realistic prediction of how quickly tablets will grow. You can view the graph here.
As of this writing, Anthony Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
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