Stock Prices Over the Edge

In the final day of February trading, Apple’s share price ended the session at the lowly price of $89.31 per share, a more than fifty percent fall off from its all-time high. In today’s trading environment, even the iPhone and iPod maker gets little respect. It doesn’t help matters that the world’s #2 PC maker, Dell, reported less than satisfactory results for its most recent quarter. Revenue and earnings were off sharply from the year-ago period, and the company has continued to view cost-cutting as the most viable means to improve its profit picture. Sony has announced yet another reorganization with the company’s CEO and chairman taking on the additional title of president to push through its own cost-cutting plan.

For Apple, the current economic climate means a slowing of the pace of Macintosh unit sales and moderating forecasts for sales of the iPhone and all components of the iPod product line. Meanwhile, many Apple watchers think the company has pushed the longevity of the current iMac and Mac Pro models past the edge of sensibility.

Apple: Stepping Back From the Edge of Innovation?

The 3G iPhone is a leader in its class. The iPod touch is setting a new standard as a handheld gaming device and entertainment center. The recent laptop refreshes are attractive, a pleasure to use, and are highly functional mobile computing devices. Snow Leopard promises to enhance Mac OS X’s performance and provide developers with an avenue to exploit the unique nature of the Mac.

But if innovation is the name of Apple’s game, where are the breakthrough computing products? Is Apple currently focused on delivering competent and evolutionary upgrades to its existing products rather than pushing innovation to the edge? Has the current economic situation impacted Apple’s product release plans, or is the company methodically developing its next generation of revolutionary devices on the quiet? Sound off in our monthly mailbag. Send your view on the matter to editor@atpm.com.

Blog Posts From the Edge

There’s a place in this world that looks like the edge of creation. Its time-chiseled rock formations have the appearance of a pre-historic wasteland. It’s a place that was thrust from the ocean depths when the Pacific and North American tectonic began their cataclysmic collide. It’s a place at the edge of a great American metropolis, and it’s the place that’s been chosen to test Apple’s iWeb component of iLife ’09.

Is iWeb on the cutting edge of Web creation tools for creative hobbyists seeking to tell a story or showcase their personal celebration of life?

We invite you to follow the creation of an iWeb-based site and its evolution from a few modest pages to a site that tells a story about life at the edge of America’s largest population center and at the edge of where the greatest of natural disasters might occur at any moment of any day. With iWeb and the other elements of iLife ’09 used exclusively as the content creation tools, this site is being crafted for a hands-on review of iWeb that will appear in our May issue. You can follow the site’s progress at http://web.me.com/robertpaul.

Taking the Edge Off the News

If the old axiom “bad news sells” was true, right now we’d all be millionaires by selling a bit of our individual economic stories. The good news is that the editors of ATPM have crafted a March issue to help you take your mind off the news with interesting reviews and a few “slice of computing life” stories. We’ll be back again in April to continue our chronicle of the “personal computing experience.”

Our March issue includes:

Mac About Town: Life in a Post-Apple World?

The news of Steve Job’s extended absence from One Infinite Loop has some in the tech world atwitter. Mac About Town muses on a post-Apple world.

MacMuser: Eating the Elephant

Mark Tennent muses the condition of job hunting in his field.

MacMuser: Mötley Crüe

Mark Tennent wonders if the paperless office has any hope of ever existing.

How To: Time Travel: Introduction to Time Machine

Sylvester Roque shares a primer to Time Machine.

Desktop Pictures: Tanzania Safari

David Siebecker offers this month’s desktop pictures from a 2006 safari in Tanzania.

Qaptain Qwerty

How do you backup your data?

Review: ChronoSync 4.0.1

With ChronoSync, pre-Leopard Mac users can backup data almost painlessly the Time Machine way.

Review: Eye-Fi Explore

Given the right scenario, the Eye-Fi Explore card shines. The only challenge: many situations probably don’t fit the shining scenario.

Review: PED3 iPhone Stand

A $40 dock alternative for people who like watching movies and don’t need the fancy outputs that Apple’s docks offer.