Like clockwork (that’s running a bit slow), Apple sent out invitations Thursday morning to next Tuesday’s news conference to announce its latest laptop computers.

Screenshot of Apple’s invitation.

The event, for press and analysts, will be held on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, Calif.

Like almost all Apple events in recent memory, the announcement has been preceded by a growing crescendo of leaks from Apple fan Web sites. Several weeks ago, word that a new manufacturing process for laptop cases was in the works, and there was widespread speculation about what the word “brick” would mean.

Previously, speculation has centered on a new design, derived from the Macbook Air, which the company introduced earlier this year at its annual MacWorld conference. Read more…

I’ve been thinking a lot about how Netflix — that odd combination of Internet ordering, the post office and DVDs — may actually be one of the companies best positioned to take advantage of online video.

Netflix rental. (Credit: Paul Sakuma/AP)

Follow me on this, because I think there is an important clue about how technology gets adopted.

In the short term, Netflix is being hit hard by the economic slowdown. It said Monday that it added far fewer subscribers in the third quarter than it had promised investors. Its shares are down about 17 percent this week.

But the company is still an improbable success story, fending off many assaults from Blockbuster. Netflix now has 8.7 million subscribers, and its more cautious forecast is to add 278,000 to 578,000 in the fourth quarter. At worst, that’s a pace of 1 million new subscribers a year — not shabby for any business.

What I’m paying attention to is the company’s still-small incursion into delivering video over the Internet. Until now, Netflix had a collection of about 10,000 older movies and TV episodes. Last week it added a catalog of 2,500 movies (mainly one to five years old) from the Starz cable network.

There is an interesting back story to that deal. Read more…

Apple’s stock took a brief roller coaster ride this morning after a CNN “citizen journalist” wrote that an “insider” reported that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the hospital with chest pains.

Steve Jobs after a product announcement on Sept. 9, 2008. (Credit: Paul Sakuma/Associated Press)

Apple immediately said that the rumor was false.

A company spokeswoman, Katie Cotton, said, “It’s not true. There is no truth to the rumor.” She said she did not know the identity of “johntw,” the individual who posted the rumor, and was not willing to speculate on what the motive for the posting might have been.

The report raised questions on several blogs about the role of citizen journalism, and there was speculation that the incident would lead to an investigation by securities regulators. Read more…

Apple has made a core strategic tenet that it will keep information about its future plans completely obscured from public view. It was able to rewrite its entire operating system for the Intel platform in secret over several years by dividing the task up into several groups who were not allowed to communicate with each other.

But Apple’s penchant for secrecy sometimes is expressed in ridiculous extremes. For example, it made people who used its software development kit for the iPhone, which is wide release, sign non-disclosure agreements. Among other effects, this appeared to make it impossible to write a book about how to develop applications for the iPhone.

Today Apple relented a bit. It announced that it would no longer enforce its non-disclosure agreement for software it has released:

Software that hasn’t been released is still covered by the agreement.

That certainly sounds like a sensible distinction: Companies have a right to keep things that are secret a secret, but once the cat is out of the bag, it can’t be a secret any more. Read more…

Apple’s push to make the iPhone a desired device among the world’s largest companies should receive a boost this week thanks to I.B.M.

At long last, I.B.M. has issued software which will bring the e-mail, calendar and contacts functions handled by its Lotus Notes software over to the iPhone. Called iNotes Ultralite, the package will be free for anyone with a Lotus Notes license, and, as of last check, I.B.M. had moved about 140 million Lotus licenses. Lotus Notes remains popular among corporations.

Apple tends to celebrate the iPhone’s place as the latest and greatest mobile device for consumers. Such attention, however, does not diminish Apple’s hopes that corporations will pick up the product as well. After all, companies can drive bulk sales and will pay for the pricey data services tied to mobile devices. Just ask the BlackBerry and Treo set.

Business customers can already tap into their corporate e-mail with the iPhone if they use Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. In addition, you’ll find software like a mobile version of Salesforce’s business applications available on the Apple App Store. Read more…

Apple investors freaked out Monday, in part because two Wall Street analysts downgraded the stock. They are worried that margins will be compressed and sales of Macintosh computers and iPhones will be less than expected.

Apple’s shares fell $22.34, or 17.4 percent, to $105.90 Monday. That compares with a 6.8 percent drop for Hewlett-Packard and a 6.4 percent fall for Dell.

How Apple handles the substantial turbulence among consumers is, in fact, a major test of its strategy and momentum. When Apple publishes its third-quarter results and — even more — its sales for the holiday season, we’ll see how its premium-priced product line holds up in tougher times. Will people still pay more for the style and ease of use of a Mac when they are worried about paying the mortgage and filling the tank in the minivan?

When a company has had the kind of business success that Apple has enjoyed over the last five years, its stock certainly can drop like Wile E. Coyote after zooming off the side of a cliff.

But after the smoke clears, the bigger question is how special is Apple now? How much will it continue to have better margins and better growth than its rivals?

I suspect this depends on two main factors: Read more…

If the HTC’s new G1 cellphone, featuring Google’s Android software, were introduced two years ago, jaws would drop. But Apple’s iPhone already won the wows that go to the first small phone that is truly good at Web browsing. So the G1 offers some interesting evolution, but not a revolution in the concept.

The G1 cellphone from T-Mobile.
Enlarge This Image

After playing with the G1 for 20 minutes, my initial take is that the G1 is the PC to the iPhone’s Macintosh.

The G1, which is initially being offered exclusively through T-Mobile in the United States and Europe, has many more buttons on the front and many more options on the screens inside. That means that it takes longer to do the things you want to do most frequently, but you also have many more options at hand. For example, when you take a photo, the software asks you whether you want to keep it or delete it. The iPhone just saves all your pictures and you have to go back and delete the ones you don’t want later. (There may be a way to change that setting on the G1, but I didn’t get around to looking at the configuration options. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot of them. It’s that sort of device.) Read more…

From our colleague David Pogue on his Pogue’s Posts blog:

Tuesday in New York, Google and T-Mobile took the stage to unveil the first Android cellphone.

Android, of course, is Google’s new cellphone operating system, which more than 30 phone companies and carriers have said they’ll adopt. I’ll have a full review when the time comes — I had only a few minutes to try the phone — but here are some first impressions.

Above all, feature-listers will be in heaven. The G1 with Android is clearly intended to be an iPhone knockoff — with all the chronic complaints addressed. Here’s your black slab, touchscreen, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, slide your finger to unlock, icons on home screen, over-the-air downloadable App store and music store, Google Maps, full-screen Web browsing, accelerometer that rotates the screen when you turn the phone 90 degrees, etc.

Yet here are the elements some people miss on the iPhone: a physical keyboard (hidden underneath the screen; you flip it out when necessary). A memory expansion card slot. A removable battery. Voice dialing. Read more…

Alex Sokirynsky spent two months, working nights and weekends, to write an application called Podcaster for the Apple iPhone, allowing people to listen to and watch Podcasts on their phones.

He was encouraged because he had written a few dozen Web-based applications that worked with the first-generation iPhone, all of which were promoted by Apple’s Web site. And he was quickly approved when he applied to download the iPhone software development kit, unlike many who faced inexplicable delays.

On Aug. 14, Mr. Sokirynsky submitted his application to be distributed through Apple’s Web store. It was his turn for an inexplicable delay. Last week, Apple finally contacted him, saying it would not distribute Podcaster. “Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes,” Apple said, according to Mr. Sokirynsky’s blog.

This is very curious. Yes, the iTunes software does allow users to download podcasts to their personal computers and transfer them onto their iPhones. But Mr. Sokirynsky’s application does two different things: It allows people to stream podcasts over a Wi-Fi or cellular connection. And it allows them to download podcast files wirelessly to watch or listen to them later. These are both functions I’d love to see in iTunesthe iPhone, but they are not there yet. Read more…

Given Apple’s super-secretive ways, it’s quite a shock to find a company engineer disclosing something about the iPhone’s future innards on a public social networking site.

Wei-han Lien, the senior manager of Apple’s chip team, dished out the morsel on LinkedIn, saying he’s busy at work crafting an ARM processor for the next-generation iPhone.

While it’s a minor revelation, Lien’s statement would confirm what many have expected ever since Apple acquired chip start-up PA Semiconductor in April for close to $300 million.

PA Semi had assembled an all-star cast of chip engineers, including Lien, and Apple confirmed that it bought the company for that talent. In a June interview with The Times’ John Markoff, Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, went one step further, saying the PA Semi team would work on designing brand-new processors for future iPhones and iPods. The only question was which kind of processors. Read more…

CORRECTED | 9/12 1:00 PM

On Wednesday, Adam Sohn, the head of public relations for Microsoft’s Zune division, told me: “Babies are born every day without an iPod. We will get there.”

That summarizes the challenge Zune faces from Apple — and Microsoft’s determination (at least for now) to meet it.

It’s hard enough trying to make a product that is more attractive, innovative, easy to use and cool than Apple does. But now many iPods are replacements by people who already have substantial music collections in iTunes. For those people, the choice is between buying an iPod that will simply work with all their music or investing the time and effort to try to convert everything tracks purchased from iTunes into Zune’s formats.

No wonder that after two years in the music player business, Zune only has a 2 percent market share. Read more…

Apple likes to remake the world to its own aesthetic, but when parts of the world assert their natural ugliness, Apple will in fact back down. The latest example is the re-emergence of NBC shows on the iTunes store for download.

Apple and the network broke up a year ago in a dispute over pricing of TV shows sold through iTunes. Apple insisted that all shows should cost $1.99. NBC wanted the flexibility to charge whatever price it saw fit — more for hits and less for older shows.

According to Jean-Briac Perrette, who runs digital distribution for NBC Universal, Apple has now given the network much of what it wanted. NBC can choose from three price points for shows: 99 cents, $1.99 and $2.99. In his product presentation Tuesday, Steve Jobs mentioned the $2.99 price point would be for high-definition programs. But Mr. Perette said the network could use that price as the base price for certain programs, like two-hour specials.

In general, the 99-cent price will be for older programs, like “Kojak” and “The A-Team”. Moreover, the company has much more flexibility to offer bundles of programs. Now, for example, it is offering season passes at discounts to the single show prices. And it can offer packages of programs bundled with other digital goodies, like games, photos or whatever.

Mr. Perrette said that NBC would have liked even more flexibility, but Apple has given the network most of what it wanted. Read more…

Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple, on Tuesday at Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event. (Credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News)

We’re at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for Apple’s annual September music event, this year entitled “Let’s Rock.” The prodigious Apple rumor mill predicts new iPod Nanos, a cheaper iPod Touch and perhaps a new version of the iTunes software. Of course everyone’s eyes will be on Steven P. Jobs, whose appearance last June generated a round of speculation about his health. Stay tuned for updates; the most recent ones are on top.

2:08 p.m. EDT | No ‘One More Thing’: And that wraps it up. Meanwhile, Apple’s stock price fell 3 percent during the presentation. Partly that’s a function of today’s down market; partly it’s the lack of product surprises from Mr. Jobs. But also, obviously, Apple’s shareholder value is now closely tied to speculative impressions of Mr. Jobs’s health. Because he looks much the same as he did in June, armchair doctors examining Mr. Jobs’s appearance here are not going to find any new reasons for comfort. (Mr. Jobs has insisted that he is fine.)

2:02 p.m. EDT | iPhone vs. Touch: More from Saul Hansell on pricing: The Touch now starts at $229 for an 8-gigabyte model, a good Christmas-present price. And it now has a price tag that is only $30 more than the 8-gigabyte iPhone (without the $2,000 in monthly costs over time). So the price doesn’t seem so out of whack.

1:53 p.m. EDT | No More? Mr. Jobs is bringing Jack Johnson on stage to perform. Is this event over? It appears that way, and if so the lack of product surprises might disappoint Apple watchers.

1:51 p.m. EDT | Mistakes Were Made: Mr. Jobs says the new software update for the Touch and iPhone, version 2.1, will fix lots of the problems of the 3G iPhone. It offers better battery life, faster iTunes backups and, crucially, fewer dropped calls. “We have fixed a lot of bugs,†he said. The software upgrade will be available on Friday. Read more…

Expect a lot of socks at Apple’s event Tuesday. IPod Socks are the sort of brand building fluff that Apple talks about when it isn’t changing the fate of humanity.

A lot of people are guessing what Apple’s “Let’s Rock” presentation in San Francisco will be. That’s the usual pre-show game. Of course, most of the guesses are about the sort of thing that would go unnoticed when any other company makes them: a slightly different shape for the iPod, “trippy” new graphics for iTunes, and no doubt all sorts of other little tweaks to its iPod lineup. (There isn’t much noise that Steve Jobs will have much to say about the Mac line Tuesday, but he’s been known to surprise.)

One key thing to watch are the price points. Apple’s normal modus operandi is to slowly increase the value and features of its product line, but to keep the prices steady. Read more…

You’ve heard by now –- because Apple news seems to travel faster than the broadband lines it’s carried over -– that Steve Jobs & Co. are planning a Sept. 9 media event. While Apple has not disclosed the precise nature of said event, it would be hard for a sentient being not to conclude it is related to the iPod group of products. The event invitation is titled “Let’s Rock,” and it features a silhouetted image from the company’s iPod marketing campaign.

The blogosphere is teeming with related analysis and speculation, which travels one nanosecond slower than Apple news. Among the speculation:

We at Bits will turn our speculative eye in a different direction –- north, to Seattle. What, you’re breathlessly wondering, might Microsoft have in mind for the Zune? (Surely, you continue to have a soft place in your heart for the Zune, which is sort of the Ron Paul of music players -– it has a small but passionate following and just enough of it to remain part of the discussion). Read more…