Here are your Apple rumors and news items for Wednesday:
Motorola Not Filling Xoom Orders Past June: Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad 2 does quick work. A Tuesday report from Taiwanese outlet DigiTimes says Motorola (NYSE:MMI) will slow shipments of its Xoom table over the second quarter and will take no more orders for the device starting in June. Motorola is expected to ship as many as 500,000 Xoom tablets by the end of March but is now expected to only deliver 300,000 in April. DigiTimes‘ source claims that, although poor sales of the Xoom are part of the reason for the production slowdown, Motorola also is working quickly to deliver a second-generation version of the device to combat the popular iPad 2.
Software Engineer Exits: Bertrand Serlet, Mac Software Engineering senior vice president and one of the chief architects of the operating system that put Apple’s computers back on the map after years of irrelevancy, said Wednesday that he is leaving the company after more than two decades. Serlet worked closely with Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on Mac OS X as well as Jobs’ other company, NeXT. The decision to leave Apple came when Serlet realized he’d prefer to “focus less on products and more on science.” Craig Federighi, another longstanding software engineer and NeXT alumnus, will take over Serlet’s responsibilities and answer directly to Jobs going forward.
Another iPad 2 Outperformance: An “HTML 5 Developer Scorecard” compiled by web development tool company Sencha found that of the tablet PCs on the market that use a WebKit-based web browser, the iOS 4.3 Safari browser on Apple’s iPad 2 is a “top rate, no compromises HTML 5 browser” while competitors running on versions of Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operating system pale in comparison. Both the Motorola Xoom that runs Android 3.0 Honeycomb and the Samsung Galaxy Tab which runs Android 2.2 were highlighted as “not ready for primetime.” Sencha’s praise for Apple’s device should be satisfying for Apple, which has focused on the new media-friendly web language with the iPhone and iPad, to the point of emphasizing HTML 5 functionality over the more commonly used media format Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) Flash.
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.
