Here is your daily Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) stock news and rumors for Monday, including a report predicting a very bad year for PC sales and new hints at the Apple iCloud features.
PC Sales Continue Decline: Research group IDC issued a report on Monday morning that is a cold comfort for players in the PC industry, predicting more trouble ahead. After an April Gartner report that found that PC sales shrank more than -1% in the first quarter of 2011, computer makers weren’t happy. But IDC’s new report, covered by Electronista, says that the PC industry will see growth before the year is in even rougher shape. Tech stocks Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and Apple don’t have cause to breathe sighs of relief, however. IDC is also expecting far less growth than it was previously. Where it was predicting the industry would grow more than 7% this year, it is now expecting just above 4% sales growth. Loren Loverde, an IDC analyst, points to both market saturation in the U.S. and Europe as the chief cause but he also highlights the cannibalizing effect of the booming smartphone and iPad markets.
New Time Capsules Key to iCloud: Apple’s Time Capsule device, a combination wireless Internet router and massive hard drive for backing up PC information, is going to be a central product in Apple’s new iCloud business. A Sunday report at Cult of Mac says that iCloud, the new service that lets Apple customers store music and other media files on Apple’s servers so they can access them anywhere on any device, will also give users access to information stored in their Time Capsule. This means that iCloud customers who also own a Time Capsule will be able to access any documents, calendars, address books, pictures or any other type of file immediately through the service. New Time Capsule devices will actually work as cloud servers rather than simply home back up machines and will actually come equipped with an A5 CPU and the iOS operating system, the same processor and operating system used in the iPad. CEO Steve Jobs will shed more light on the new iCloud service and the new Time Capsule on Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at @ajohnagnello and become a fan of InvestorPlace on Facebook.
