Here is your daily Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) stock news and rumors for Monday. Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes his second medical leave of absence in two years. The App Store is set to outpace iTunes’ music sales by March. The next generation iPhone and iPad are rumored to have a new custom chip set with super fast dual graphics cores that will give iOS devices 1080p video support. Finally, three new Best Buy product listings point to the next round of iPad releases.
Steve Jobs Begins Medical Leave, Remains CEO: For the second time in two years, Apple’s famous chief executive officer Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence from the company. Jobs issued a note as part of a broader press release announcing his leave of absence on Monday morning. The note did not specify how long Jobs would be away from the company. Chief operating officer Tim Cook will take over Apple’s daily operations just as he did between January and June of 2009 when Jobs recovered from receiving a liver transplant. Jobs will remain Apple CEO and continue to participate in making “major strategic decisions for the company.” The announcement was made on Martin Luther King Jr. Day when the NASDAQ stock exchange where Apple trades were closed, helping lessen a possible dip in share price following the announcement of Jobs’ departure. But we’ll see how the market behaves Tuesday.
App Store Sales to Outpace iTunes Music Sales By March: By the time it celebrated its third birthday, the Apple App Store will outperform its digital storefront big brother, the iTunes music and video store, by a wide margin. Asymco‘s Horace Dediu published a detailed study that tracked the growth of both the App Store and iTunes by number of total downloads on Sunday and found that the App Store will the milestone of 10 billion total downloads in less than half the time it took iTunes to hit that same marker. Launched in April 2003 as the iTunes Music Store, Apple’s first digital media storefront saw its 10 billionth download in February 2010, 67 months after it first opened. By Dediu’s calculations, the iOS App Store will hit 10 billion downloads in March of this year, just 31 months after it opened for business. Not including software updates, the average iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad user downloads more than 60 apps to their device.
iPhone 5 and iPad 2 Will Feature New Dual Core SGX543 GPU: AppleInsider reported on Sunday evening that Apple will introduce a new version of their custom A4 chip with new “ultrafast” graphics processing cores into their next generation of smartphones and tablet PCs this year. The new SGX543 will replace that SGX535 GPU that’s been a fixture in iOS devices since the 2009 release of the iPhone 3GS. The new System on a Chip and its powerful GPU will purportedly support Apple’s Retina Display on the iPads 2 as well as 1080p video support to all iOS devices, including the Apple TV. The source behind this new rumor is the same that informed AppleInsider in 2008 of the licensing deals between Samsung, Apple, and Imagination Technologies (PINK: IGNMF) that led to the creation of the current A4 chip used in the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4.
Best Buy Product Placeholders Hint at iPad 2: Best Buy’s (NYSE: BBY) online store has added three new iPads to its product listings each of which is said to be “Coming Soon” indicating that the big box electronics retailer is preparing for the impending announcement and release of a new Apple tablet PC. Each listing is labeled “Apple Computer Inc. – Apple iPad SKU WiFi,” with two listings priced at $599.99 and a third at $699.99. These listings have different SKU numbers (stock-keeping unit numbers from tracking products) than the existing models of WiFi-only iPads, confirming that these are indeed different products. But this is not a lock. It’s possible that these listings are not for a second generation iPad but the CDMA-compatible iPad Verizon (NYSE: VZ) will begin offering later this spring.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
