Here are your daily Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) news items and rumors for Monday: new iPhones, iPads, and iPods, images for iPad 2 protective cases are taken down, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) debuts its Sandy Bridge chip, and Final Cut gets an update.
More of the Same: Where 2010 was the year of bold expansion into new markets, 2011 will be Apple’s year of refinement, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. In a Monday note sent to investors, Munster said Apple likely won’t release any new products other than updates of existing devices this year. That doesn’t mean the company will rest on its laurels, however. Munster said consumers should expect new models of iPad, iPod, and iPhone this year. The analyst said there’s a strong chance Apple will introduce an iPhone 5 and a new iPod Touch with near-field communication technology that would let users pay for merchandise at retail outlets.
The note also says there is an 80% chance that the iPad 2 will debut this spring, a 90% chance that the cloud-based iTunes service will finally be unveiled, and a 95% chance that a CDMA-standard iPhone will be introduced on Verizon’s (NYSE:VZ) network during the first quarter of this year.
iPad 2 Case Images Pulled: Cases for a purported second-generation iPad showed up on e-commerce site Alibaba.com late last week before promptly getting pulled, according to the Wall Street Journal. Alibaba spokesman John Spelich said that the site was asked to remove the images under threat of legal action, though he did not specify whether it was Apple or another party that asked for the case images to be removed.
This is the second time in the past week that a website hosting images of an iPad 2 case — images that prominently show an opening for the vented speaker rumored to be part of the new tablet’s design — have been asked to take those images down. Apple-focused blog 9 to 5 Mac was asked last Wednesday to take down similar images.
Intel’s Latest: On Monday, Intel unveiled the next processor to likely appear in MacBooks and Mac desktop computers. The new Sandy Bridge next-generation core processor will, according to Intel’s announcement, “achieve higher performance and power efficiency, even on single-threaded tasks, where the integration of multiple CPU cores hasn’t been much help.” Sandy Bridge will be especially beneficial for future Mac owners thanks to the processor’s improved graphics capabilities over its current Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) chip. That graphics processing unit caused enough trouble in Apple’s laptops that they had to refund users and replace thousands of MacBook Pro machines following a class action lawsuit in 2010.
Here Comes Final Cut: French website Hard Mac claimed Monday morning that Apple’s Final Cut video-editing software suite will get an update in either March or April. Beta versions are already running on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and the upcoming OS X 10.7 Lion update, with a number of new features only running on the Lion platform due to changes made to Quicktime in the update. The site says that the update, whose features are not detailed, will predominantly affect the basic version of the Final Cut software while Final Cut Pro will only see minimal changes.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
