Here are your Apple rumors and news items for Thursday:
Spartan Steps Up: Techcrunch is reporting that Facebook is cooking up something big to cut into Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) app and media business on the iPhone and iPad. Codenamed Project Spartan, the project is a brand new app store intended for Apple’s handhelds, one that will deliver brand new gaming and newsreading apps from companies like Zynga and AOL’s (NYSE:AOL) Huffington Post. Canny investors may recall, however, that Apple refuses to distribute competing digital store apps through its app store. Facebook will circumvent this rule by building Project Spartan on the HTML 5 Web standard, meaning it can be accessed through Apple’s Safari web browser. A brand new app store filled with products custom built with Facebook tools? Apple CEO Steve Jobs won’t like that one bit.
MacBook Air Means Money: More analysts are predicting good things for Apple’s super-thin laptop, the MacBook Air. Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore issued a note on Monday saying that he believes that Apple could sell as many as 1.5 million of the laptops every quarter, eventually accounting for 50% of the company’s total laptop business. On Thursday, JPMorgan’s Mark Moskowitz says that even though Apple may not sell as many MacBook Airs as Whitmore believes, it still stands to rake in more than $3 billion in revenue from the device. This prediction is based on his expectation that Apple should ship 700,000 MacBook Airs in the next three quarters.
Spruce Up: A Thursday report from ifoAppleStore (via Mac Rumors) said that Apple plans to revamp its iconic Apple Store on Fifth Avenue just below New York City’s Central Park. The overhaul means that the store’s distinguishing feature, a massive glass cube surrounding the entrance, will be removed and cleaned. This late spring-cleaning project is going to set the company back nearly $7 million. Chump change for Apple, but good evidence of how opulent its retail operations truly are.
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.
