Here are your daily Apple news items and rumors for Wednesday:
OS X Busted: Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has won a number of high-profile patent suits in recent months, with smartphone competitors like Nokia (NYSE:NOK) and HTC coming under fire for infringing on patents held by the Cupertino, Calif.-based company. According to a Tuesday report at Bloomberg, however, Apple is now under scrutiny. The International Trade Commission ruled July 1 that the company’s Mac OS X operating system, used in the company’s Mac desktop and MacBook laptop computers, violates patents held by S3 Graphics. In an interesting twist, S3 recently was acquired by none other than HTC. It is possible Apple will settle its dispute with HTC by allowing that company to continue using technology that infringes on Apple’s mobile technology in return for the ability to continue using the S3-owned graphics chip technology the OS X system infringes on.
Ever-Shrinking MacBook: Apple released new MacBook Air laptop models sporting Intel‘s (NASDAQ:INTC) Sandy Bridge processors Thursday, but a rumor at Mac Rumors indicates that even more new MacBook laptops are on the way. The company already is in the final testing phase of new ultra-thin 15- and 17-inch models of its high-end MacBook Pro laptops. These new devices, expected out by the holiday season, would have the light and compact form factor of the newer MacBook Air models while retaining the high specifications of previous MacBook Pro models. These new models would fit with Apple’s new strategy; the company has discontinued the regular MacBook line of laptops that use optical drives for reading CDs and DVDs, as well as hard disk drives for memory storage. A new compact line of MacBook Pros that do away with optical drives and use flash memory seems like a no-brainer.
The Low (Price) Road: A new survey conducted by research group Retrevo and reprinted at TUAW holds the secret to defeating the iPad that other tablet manufacturers have been hunting for: Go cheap. Nearly half of respondents interested in purchasing a tablet said a low price is the most important factor determining their purchase. Close to 80% of respondents said they would opt for a Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android tablet such as Motorola‘s (NYSE:MMI) Xoom over an iPad if, and only if, it cost less than $250. When asked which manufacturer survey respondents would choose, more than half said they would opt for Amazon‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN) still-unannounced Kindle tablet.
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.
