…when the Apple II was introduced at the inaugural West Coast Computer Faire in April, 1977, it suffered from what, in retrospect, was a glaring shortcoming: It had no disk drive.
Apple needs some real hit devices in 2013: Goldman Sachs (Times of India)
Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE:GS) dropped Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) off its list of most highly recommended stocks on Tuesday as it joined other analysts in reducing expectations for a company that hasn’t had a revolutionary new product since the iPad in 2010. Goldman analyst Bill Shope said the iPhone 5, introduced last fall, hasn’t sold as well as he expected. He said the company now needs some real hits among the products it rolls out during the second half of the year in order to boost the stock price.
France Telecom CEO Says Frugal Buyers Threaten Sales of IPhone (Bloomberg)
France Telecom SA (FTE) Chief Executive Officer Stephane Richard, head of one of Europe’s largest wireless carriers, said the increasing frugality of customers is threatening sales of pricey phones such as Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s iPhone. “We are in a period of changing consumer behavior,” Richard said yesterday during an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. There are fewer shoppers in search of the latest and greatest gadget, and more of them are seeking lower prices on wireless service, he said.
Computing pioneer Alan Kay calls Apple’s iPad user interface ‘poor’ (Apple Insider)
Alan Curtis Kay is recognized as one of the few people behind the concepts that have defined much of personal computing over the past three decades. A former Apple Fellow, Disney Imagineering Fellow, and Xerox PARC Labs associate, Kay also developed the vision for the Dynabook, an iPad precursor of sorts that would have been a portable suite of hardware, software, programming tools, and services. The Dynabook was meant as a tool to instruct children in digital creativity, and while the iPad bears some resemblance to it, Kay told Time’s Techland that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s bestselling tablet in some ways betrays the vision he and others had.
Apple Will Lose Friends And Markets With Its Patent Strategy (Forbes)
Overlooked in the persistent rumors around a new iPhone launch, the US Patent Office yesterday denied Apple most of its patent claims on the rubber banding effect on the iPhone. In total the Patent Office rejected 17 claims in the patent but approved three. That follows an earlier decision that rejected all 20. The rubber banding effect is one where the page appears to bounce back at the end of a scroll and is a component in the patent dispute between Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Samsung.
