On Tuesday, Oct. 14, Apple will unveil the latest addition to a long line of portable computers that dates back nearly 20 years — to the ungainly, 15.8-pound “Macintosh Portable” that PC World named the 17th worst technology product of all time. (link)

Apple’s notebook offerings have come a long way since 1989. They now outsell Apple desktop machines by nearly 65%. In Q3, they accounted for 29% of Apple’s (AAPL) total revenue. (See All eyes on the MacBook.)

To commemorate Cupertino’s notebook computers past and present (they run too hot these days to be safely designated “laptops”), we’ve assembled the photo gallery that appears below the fold.

[Thanks to MacTracker and dave~ for doing the heavy lifting.]

Continue Reading: “Spotlight on Apple notebooks: 1989 to 2008″

Something interesting happened to Apple’s share price at about 3:45 p.m. Thursday, just as the bottom was falling out of the rest of the market — leaving the Dow down 679 points (7.3%) for the day.

That’s when Apple (AAPL) reversed course and started moving up.

The trend continued early Friday morning. Even as the Dow fell another 600 points in first few minutes of trading, Apple was enjoying its own private rally. In mid-morning trading, Apple was up nearly 8 points (9%) while the Dow was still deep in the red.

It closed the day at 96.8, up 8.06 (9%), while the Dow ended down 128 points (-1.5%).

The divergence is even clearer when you compare Apple’s performance with the NASDAQ (see chart.) There’s no telling how long this will last, but for the moment, Apple’s shares seem to be going their own way.

Why is this happening now? There was nothing in Friday’s analysts’ reports to explain it; indeed, Oppenheimer & Co. chose Friday morning to lower its target for Apple, to $145 from $213. And for now, none of the other four horsemen of technology — Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and RIM (RIMM) — are following Apple’s lead. (See Market free fall: How Apple fared.)

What’s more likely is that Apple may have finally hit some kind of bottom — around $86 a share, a 20-month low — focusing investor attention on what’s coming in the weeks ahead: 1) a new line of high-margin notebook computers scheduled to be unveiled Oct. 14 and 2) a quarterly earnings report on Oct. 21 that are widely expected to blow past Apple’s guidance numbers.

Given the volatility of this stock, however, the trend is unlikely to last for long. The next bit of bad news for Apple is likely to come directly from CFO Peter Oppenheimer (no relation) in the company’s Oct. 21 conference call. Given the level of consumer confidence going into the holiday selling season, Apple’s Q1 guidance — always conservative — is sure to be even more chilling than usual.

In a report to clients Thursday, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster added some meat to the bare-bones invitation Apple sent out a couple hours earlier. (See here and here.)

The most important news, according to Munster, is that Apple for the first time since it discontinued the iBook will be offering its premium notebook computers below the psychologically-important $1,000 barrier. Specifically:

• Higher quality, lower-priced MacBooks. Munster expects the new MacBooks, which currently sell for $1,099 and come in black or white, to be clad in a new aluminum casing with a gesture-based touchpad and to sell for $899 to $999. “In other words, we expect the new MacBooks to be a meaningful upgrade with an [average sales price] 9% to 18% lower.”
• New MacBook Pros. Munster also expects Apple to introduce redesigned MacBook Pros at the same or slightly lower price. The current MacBook Pro design was introduced almost 3 years ago at $1,999. The new machines, he writes, will likely be thinner and include a more-sophisticated, gesture-based trackpad. He estimates they will start at $1,899.
• New MacBook Airs. Munster expects Apple to introduce new MacBook Airs with updated specs, but doesn’t offer any further detail.
• No Tablet Mac. “While we are confident that Apple will eventually bring its touchscreen technology from the iPhone to the Mac,” he writes, “we do not expect to see a touchscreen Mac this year.”

Piper Jaffray is sticking with its target price of $250 a share. In midday trading Thursday, Apple (AAPL) was up 3% to just over $92.

[UPDATE 2: New, improved spy photos emerged on Sunday. See here.]

[UPDATE: Invitations for the rumored Oct. 14 special event -- "The spotlight turns to notebooks" -- arrived Thursday noon.]

It’s becoming clear, at least to some Apple watchers, that Oct. 14 will come and go without On Thursday, Apple e-mailed reporters with invitations for the rumored show-and-tell at which Steve Jobs is supposed to introduce a new line of MacBooks — the aging notebook computers that now account for 30% of Apple’s quarterly revenue. (See All eyes on the MacBook.)

But we’re getting close, judging by the frequency with which spy photos are starting to emerge. There’s even a leaked price list that has Apple selling MacBooks for as low as $800 (see below).

The latest set of pictures, posted by a Taiwanese blogger at Apple.pro and republished by MacRumors, may very well be fakes, but they are consistent with reports that Apple has switched to a new manufacturing process that carves the shells of its notebooks out of a single “brick” of aluminum. (See Has Steve Jobs built a secret MacBook factory?)

Accompanied by Chinese characters that, roughly translated, invite readers to look at “three mystical pictures transmitted greatly peacefully,” the photos purport to show “the fable joins MacBook which the aluminum shell helps the C shell.”  (link)

The photos are pasted below in their original form:

Note that although these images are similar in several respects to the image at right, posted earlier in the week by Engadget, they are clearly from different machines (or different Photoshop sessions). For example, the space between the keyboard holes and the outer edge of the computer in this image is wider than in the images above.

Meanwhile, Duncan Riley at The Inquisitor claims to have got his hands on an official price list for the new machines. According to his source:

“Apple retail stores have been given price sheets that list 12 price points for the new range, with prices between $800-$3100. Current lines only have 8 price points, 3 Macbooks starting at $1099, 3 Macbook Pros and 2 Macbook Airs.” (link)

Riley adds that Apple retail outlets usually receive price lists 10 days before products hit the market, which would push the launch date into the third week of October. Several commentators dispute Riley’s 10-day rule and suggest that we shouldn’t expect to see the new machines before November.

Why would anyone with inside information share it with these rumor sites, given the speed and severity with which Apple (AAPL) punishes leakers? You have to wonder. Foxconn, Apple’s Taiwanese manufacturing partner, is said to be even more strict about these things, which may explain the cryptic message posted below the Apple.com images:

下班後小心別被磚塊打

This, according to Babel Fish, roughly translates as:

“After getting off work, careful be not projected on by the brick bat.”

Today’s economic crisis doesn’t seem to have reached the 769 high school students polled in Piper Jaffray’s 16th bi-annual survey of teenage buying patterns and preferences.

The survey, conducted at several apparently well-heeled high schools in the United States over the past few weeks — while the global financial markets were melting down — focused on MP3 players, online music and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

The results, released late Tuesday, may say more about the demographics of the population Piper Jaffray is testing than the buying power of most U.S. teenagers, but they will be music to Steve Jobs’s ears. According to senior research analyst Gene Munster, who directed the study:

• 8% own iPhones, up from from 6% in Spring 2008.
• 22% of students surveyed expect to buy an iPhone in the next 6 months, up from 9% in Spring 2008.
• Of students expecting to buy a mobile phone, 33% specified an iPhone.
• iPod market share rose to 84% from 82% in Fall 2007.
• Of the 40% of students who legally purchase music online, 93% said they use iTunes (up from 79% in Fall 2007).

Below: Details from the iPhone portion of the survey.

Apple was the outlier Monday. On a day in which the Dow lost nearly 370 points (having plunged 800 points in midday trading), Apple’s shares actually ended up in positive territory, closing at $98.14, up 1.1%.

But to see that as good news you would have to ignore the fact that at one point Monday Apple was trading for $87.24 a share — off nearly 60% from its December 2007 high of $202.96.

Apple closed down nearly 9 points (9.5%) Tuesday, while the Dow fell more than 508 points (5.11%).

To get a feel for how Apple is really faring, you can compare its performance with what CNBC’s Jim Cramer calls the four horsemen of technology: Apple (AAPL), Research in Motion (RIMM), Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN).

As it turns out, the biggest loser over the past two weeks has been RIM, down 38.5% over the past 10 trading days — and off nearly 65% from its 12-month high.

The best performer of the four: Amazon, off only 9% for the fortnight, and within 40% of its 12-month high.

But Amazon’s price-to-earnings ratio is a dizzying 47, while Apple is now hovering around 20. That’s still above the market average, as Henry Blodget points out in Silicon Alley Insider, “but low for a stock with this wide and passionate a following and a still-solid growth story.”

Here’s a snapshot of the past two weeks of trading, taken before the markets opened on Tuesday:

Below: live fever charts for all four stocks.

Here’s bit of upbeat economic news to brighten a gloomy Monday.

On Aug. 1, a London-based investor who calls himself “Tommo_UK” posted a message on The Mac Observer’s Apple Finance Board asking anyone who had bought an iPhone 3G to provide three pieces of data: the serial number (with a few digits X’d out), the date of purchase, and the first 13 digits of the so-called IMEI number.

The International Mobile Equipment Identity is a unique 15 digit number assigned to every cell phone when it is manufactured and can be found on the back of the box in which the iPhone is packaged. Tommo_UK’s plan was to gather enough IMEIs to decipher the meaning of those digits and determine Apple’s production rate. To get things rolling he offered his own: 01 161200 06652xx, purchased on July 11, the day the iPhone 3G was launched. (link)

Two months later, the TMO’s Apple Finance Board — with a lot of help from a member of Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity board who calls himself “howlongtoretire” — has gathered IMEIs on nearly 150 iPhone 3Gs and published them in a big Google docs spreadsheet here. The most recent entry: a 8 GB black iPhone manufactured on Sept. 29 and purchased on Oct. 4 that was, according to its IMEI, the 9,190,680th iPhone 3G built this year.

Writing in Bullish Cross on Monday, Andy Zaky and Turley Muller have used this data to make some bold predictions about what Apple is going to say when it releases its quarterly earnings report later this month.

They acknowledge that even if Apple has built more than 9 million iPhones, that doesn’t mean they have all been sold. Some of those devices may have been defective. Some may be sitting in inventory on store shelves or loading docks.

But taking all that into account, Zaky and Muller conclude that Apple has probably sold considerably more iPhones last quarter than even the Street’s most bullish analysts anticipate. Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, for example, predicted on Sept. 22 that Apple would sell 5 million iPhones in its fourth quarter, which ended five days later. (link)

Zaky and Muller’s bottom line:

“even if a whopping 1.5 million iPhones of the total IMEI registered devices are unsold as of today, an unlikely assumption, it would still put 3G iPhone sales at 7.6 million units.” (link)

Why is 7.6 million significant? Because coming into its fourth quarter, Apple had already sold 2.42 million first-generation iPhones. So if Tommo_UK’s IMEI data can be trusted and if Zaky and Muller’s analysis is correct, Apple (AAPL) has reached its oft-stated goal of selling at least 10 million iPhones in 2008 with three months to spare.

”I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer,” Steve Jobs told Fortune 18 years ago, describing the 40,000-square-foot plant he had constructed in Fremont, Calif., to manufacture circuit boards for his ill-fated NeXT, the $10,000 workstation into which Jobs poured his heart and soul after he was forced out of Apple (AAPL) in 1985.

The factory, as Jobs described it, had everything: robots, lasers, tolerances within one 10,000th of an inch, defect rates of less that 17 parts per million — one tenth the rest of the industry’s — and the speed to turn out 60 machines a day. (link)

Now, according to a pair of reports in 9 to 5 Mac and Computerworld Blogs, Jobs has built that plant’s successor: a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility that is already turning out the new line of MacBook and MacBook Pros that Apple is expected to introduce on Oct. 14.

This factory, according to Seth Weintraub, a tech reporter with good sources within Apple and a knack for correctly predicting the company’s next moves, is the answer to a question that has been haunting Apple watchers for the past month: What is “the Brick”?

The Brick, Weintraub says, is not a new Apple TV, a table-sized Mac, a wireless USB hub, a Windows-smashing software breakthrough — or any of the other ideas put forward in the month of fevered speculation since Weintraub’s 9-to-5 colleague Cleve Nettles first posed the question. (See Anatomy of an Apple rumor: “The Brick”.)

What the Brick really is, according to Weintraub’s sources, is a block of high-quality, aircraft grade aluminum out of which Apple’s new laptops will be carved using robot-controlled lasers and high-powered jets of water in Jobs’ new factory.

“It is totally revolutionary, a game changer,” writes Weintraub. “One of the biggest Apple innovations in a decade.” (link)

It may also be the answer to another mystery that has bedeviled Apple watchers — the innovation that Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer, speaking at the last quarterly earnings conference call, warned analysts would cut deeply into Apple’s near term operating margins but result in something that “Apple’s competitors won’t be able to match” for years to come. (See Apple teases with mysterious “product transition”.)

Weintraub paints a picture, drawn heavily from a long piece in The Mac Observer by John Martellaro, a former NASA engineer and Apple manager, of a nonpolluting, energy-efficient, wind- or solar-power plant, built in the United States, that would free Apple of its dependence on Chinese manufacturers (and unpleasant Chinese labor conditions) and fulfill Steve Jobs’ long-held dream of moving Apple both up and down the value chain — building a legacy at Apple that could survive and prosper long after he is gone.

“An Apple factory (or two), in the right place,” writes Marellaro, “costing several billions would be a worthy endeavor for Apple and its cash. It would achieve the grandest goals for Apple’s technical future, make a contribution to the planet and its people’s well being and help insure Apple’s financial and political security.” (link)

Marellaro concludes on a wistful note: “But, sigh, it’s just an idea”

We’ll find out soon enough how much of it is true.

Should investors take comfort in the news that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating “Johntw,” the as-yet unidentified rumor mongerer who briefly drove Apple (AAPL) down nearly 10% Friday before Apple PR finally broke its silence and let it be known that Steve Jobs had not, in fact, suffered a heart attack? (link)

Not necessarily.

As anybody who follows the company knows, rumors about Apple — negative and positive — are as common as crabgrass. This one, posted on CNN’s iReport site, was particularly egregious, as it hit Apple where it is most vulnerable. CNN and Fortune are both owned by Time Warner (TWX).

CNN says it is cooperating with the investigation, giving the SEC what information it has about Johntw (most likely limited to an IP number and an e-mail address), and it is possible that the Feds will get their man. Or woman.

But then what? Although SEC Chairman Christopher Cox supposedly declared war against false rumors in July when Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac were getting clobbered by short-sellers, he admitted to the Senate Banking Committee at the time that before he stepped up the plate, the SEC had never before in its 75-year history brought market manipulation charges against a trader who was knowingly spreading lies.

It’s true that in April Cox’s SEC made an example of a trader named Paul Berliner, charging him with securities fraud for spreading a made-up story (via instant messages to traders in brockerage firms and hedge funds) that the Blackstone Group was renegotiating the price it had agreed to pay to acquire Alliance Data Systems — all while Berliner was selling ADS short, according to the SEC. (See here.)

“The message of this case is simple and direct” Cox thundered in the accompanying press release. “The Commission will vigorously investigate and prosecute those who manipulate markets with this witch’s brew of damaging rumors and short sales.”

But what did Berliner pay for his alleged crimes? He agreed to settle the charges by “disgorging” $26,129 in profits and interest, paying a penalty of $130,000 (the maximum), and consenting an order barring him from futher association with any broker or dealer. (link)

Will $130,000 dissuade anyone who is making millions at this game?

In his famous video interview with TheStreet.com — since removed from YouTube — CNBC personality and former hedge fund manager Jim Cramer told viewers how simple and profitable the game can be — especially with stocks like RIM (RIMM) and Apple.

Take Apple before iPhone came out, he says on tape, “it’s very important to spread the rumor that both Verizon and AT&T decided they didn’t like the phone… and this is very easy because the people who write about Apple want that story and you can claim that it’s credible because you spoke to someone at Apple because Apple doesn’t issue any statements.”

It may be illegal, he adds, but it’s easy to do “because the SEC doesn’t understand it.” (link)

The SEC now says it understands what’s going on — although if they catch Johntw they still have to prove he (or she) was trying to profit from the false post. But it’s not at all clear — especially with everything else that’s going on in the market — that Cox has the resources to catch the thousands of Internet day traders who try to work this con every day of the week.

Or the teeth to make any punishments stick.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Chase Jamie Dimon, for one, wants the SEC to toughen its sanctions.

“I think if someone knowingly starts a rumor or passes on a rumor, they should go to jail,” he recently told Charlie Rose. “This is even worse than insider trading. This is deliberate and malicious destruction of value and people’s lives.” (link)

On Tuesday we looked at one part of the ChangeWave survey that helped trigger the largest one-day drop in Apple’s (AAPL) share price in eight years. It showed a falloff in corporate plans to buy Apple computers over the next 90 days. (See here.)

Today we got our hands on the second part — the consumer part. And while it goes a long way to explaining why Apple’s shares were downgraded by analysts on Monday, it also suggests that the bigger problem is a broad decline in spending on consumer electronics — one that will not only color Apple’s guidance when it issues its quarterly report later this month, but could take much of the joy out of this year’s holiday sales.

The good news in the survey is that 23% of respondents — of 4,262 early adopter types contacted between Sept. 16 and Sept. 26 — said they plan to buy an Apple laptop computer in the next three months.  Another 17% said they plan to buy an Apple desktop.

The bad news, as you can see in the chart below, is that those numbers are down pretty sharply from the month before — a full 5 points for laptops and 4 points for desktops.

“These are the weakest numbers we’ve seen all year for Apple in terms of future buying,” writes Paul Carton, ChangeWave VP for research. “And the biggest drop in 2 ½ years.”

Carton’s survey of spending over the past 90 days suggests that Apple should have no trouble meeting its sales targets for the quarter that ended Sept. 27. But his findings for the next 90 days suggest that Apple’s guidance — always conservative — will be even more so this time, and could spook already skittish investors.

But what’s really scary is what ChangeWave discovered when it asked those same 4,262 early adopters whether they were expecting to spend more (blue line) on consumer electronics over the next three months or less (red line):

Note that intentions to spend on consumer electronics usually trend up before Christmas — sharply two years ago, less so last year. What we are seeing here, says Carton, is “the weakest 90-day outlook for electronics spending ever recorded in a ChangeWave survey.”

So while we may be looking at a tough three months for Apple, the prospects for the rest of the consumer electronics industry this holiday season could be truly dismal.

Thanks to Paul Carton for talking us through the surveys, and for permission to repost his charts.

From the Changewave Alliance website:

ChangeWave runs a proprietary network of 15,000 highly qualified business, technology, and medical professionals referred to as the ChangeWave Alliance. Alliance members are credentialed experts in leading companies of select industries who spend their everyday lives working on the frontline of technological change. (link)