Here are your Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) news items and rumors for Monday: a new iPad newspaper, an iPhone 4 push at Sam’s Club, games boom on the iPad and an iLife update.
Here Comes The Daily: Last week didn’t deliver on the rumor that Apple would announce an iPad-only newspaper called The Daily, in partnership with News Corp. (NWS: NYSE). But MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka, himself a News Corp. employee, says The Daily is still on track for an early 2011 launch and that iPad owners will be able to subscribe to the new tablet paper on Jan. 17. Subscriptions to The Daily are expected to be affordable, just 99 cents a week, and will include daily content updates.
Cheaper iPhone 4s at Sam’s Club: Just two weeks ago, wholesaler Costco (NASDAQ: COST) said it would stop selling Apple products like the iPod Touch and iPhone due to Apple’s refusal to let them stock the iPad tablet PC as well. Costco’s biggest competitor, Wal-Mart’s (NYSE: WMT) Sam’s Club division, on the other hand, is practially giving away Apple’s products, particularly the much-coveted iPhone 4 smartphone.
An internal memo published by tech blog Engadget on Monday says the wholesale outlet is planning on selling the 16-gigabyte iPhone 4 for $147 when purchased with a two-year contract with telecom provider AT&T (NYSE: T). Sam’s Club also will offer last year’s iPhone 3GS model at a steep discount as well — just $47 with a two-year contract.
Both sales will run between now and Christmas. The aggressive promotion is the second this season to knock more than $50 off the usual iPhone price tag. Radio Shack (NYSE: RSH) ran an identical promotion earlier this month and sold out of Apple’s smartphone across all of their retail outlets in the U.S.
Video Game Apps Dominate iPad: Video game applications are a growing focus for Apple’s iOS platform, and their importance on the iPad tablet PC are made evident by a new study from market research group Interpret. The study found that video-game apps are only outstripped by Web-browsing as the primary use of tablets, including the iPad.
Interpret found that while 58% of all tablet users use the device to surf the Internet, 52% use their tablet for playing video games. The research group also found that consumers who identify as active gamers are likely to buy a tablet sometime in the next three months.
Coming Back to iLife: Apple blog 9 to 5 Mac has made a compelling argument that Apple will launch the new version of its iLife suite of applications exclusively through the Mac App Store when the new digital storefront goes live on Jan. 6. While not conclusive by any means, the blog’s argument is sound. Reports are that retail copies of iLife ’09 are running low at Apple Stores and not being restocked, and although iLife ’11 has been expected to launch for months now, Apple has yet to commit to a retail release.
Meanwhile, 9 to 5 Mac noted that Apple’s online store auto-fills entries of “iLife” into its search engine as “iLife 11.” This seems to indicate that the company is preparing a version of the suite to be exclusively available via digital distribution. A collection of desirable OS X apps like Pages, Keynote, and Numbers would be ideal as launch offerings on the Mac App Store.
As of this writing, Anthony Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
