Tuesday Apple Rumors: Still Rollin’ in Dough

Here are your Apple news items and rumors for Tuesday: Mac, Lion Bring Summer
Bank: Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL ) has reported two record-breaking quarters in a row,
and according to a Tuesday report at All Things Digital , the companys third
quarter should be just as good. Leading the charge for Apples summer sales is
the new MacBook Air laptop line and the companys new Lion operating system , the
first major upgrade to the OS X operating system that is only available as a
digital download through the Mac App Store, as well as in new laptops and
desktops. The NPD Group said July Mac sales in the U.S. were up 26% compared to
the same month in 2010 growth thats six times greater than that of the rest of
the PC market. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster thinks Apples Mac sales will
taper off into the fourth quarter, but if rumors of an entirely new Mac product
line turn out to be true, Apples PC business might continue to impress for some
time yet. Here Comes iPhone 4S: Speaking of sales successes for Apple, Reuters
reported Tuesday that sources in Apples Asian supply chain claim to already be
producing the long-rumored smaller, cheaper iPhone. The new phone will sport an
8GB flash drive half the size of the flash drive in the cheapest current model
of iPhone which will help reduce the cost of the device. Samsung, the current
supplier of flash drives used in the iPhone, declined comment. The goal of
introducing a cheaper model of iPhone is to gain an even greater presence in
emerging markets such as China, a country into which Apple already has made
significant gains. Apple is expected to announce both this new iPhone 4S and a
high-end iPhone 5 in September , with an October release to follow.
Flash-to-iPad Business Doing Swift Business: iSwifter is a cloud-based service
that converts games and other media built using Adobe s (NASDAQ: ADBE ) Flash
format for use on Apples iPad. Apple is notorious for keeping its portable
devices like the iPhone and iPad incompatible with Flash, requiring
Flash-dependent services like Google s (NASDAQ: GOOG ) YouTube to build
proprietary applications for their devices. iSwifter works around Apples
restrictions by streaming Flash games running on its servers to devoted apps
running on the iPad. The business has been doing so well that it expects
revenues for 2011 to total $10 million. If nothing else, iSwifter is a promising
example for other cloud-service start-ups looking to target the iPad and iPhone.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the
stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at