Apple (AAPL) shareholders: you need to get a grip.

On Wednesday, AAPL sold off on news that the company, CEO Steve Jobs, former CFO Fred Anderson, former general counsel Nancy Heinen and several Apple board members were hit with a purported class-action lawsuit in federal court in San Jose related to the company’s stock-options backdating scandal. Shareholder lawsuits always sound scary, but there’s nothing to this that holders don’t already know: the company admitted that some options were backdated, but both Apple and Jobs have avoided any federal prosecution. Anderson settled SEC charges related to the situation; litigation by the Commission against Heinen is pending.

Spectrum Control, Inc. (SPEC)

F2Q08 Earnings Call

On June 27, Dell picked up 2.23 million shares at $22.93. On June 30, he picked up 100,000 at $21.94. And on July 1, he added 2,173,600 shares at $21.89. Not to shabby. Do the math and that equates to a little more than $100 million worth of Dell stock in three days.

IGM held more than half its assets in its top ten holdings during those three months—standard operating procedure for this fund—so strong performance by the largest U.S. tech stocks gave the fund's momentum a strong boost. IGM ranked 14th on the ETF Momentum Tracker Sector Table last week, up from 33rd on April 8. Whether IGM's momentum continues to build will depend largely on a few factors: how much tech spending slows in response to the turmoil in the U.S. economy, the success of the latest products released by major U.S. tech firms, and the ability of those firms to tap into overseas markets.

While bears have been calling for a renewed drop in NAND pricing, they believe the 50M chip order could remove a lot of NAND inventory and reduce a lot of inventory overhang from Samsung. Think believes it will also stabilize the NAND spot and contract pricing trends. If the pickup from the AAPL iPhone, given what they view as an attractive $199 price-tag in the U.S. and free offers in some countries, is ahead of forecasts, it could drive more allocations from Samsung and help stabilize NAND pricing through the quarter

Apple (AAPL) shares are on the rise Tuesday morning, lifted by bullish comments from Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi.

While Sacconaghi maintains a Market Perform rating on the stock, Tuesday morning he raised his price target on the shares to $175 from $165. He also upped his EPS estimate for the September 2008 fiscal year to $5.27 from $5.17; for FY ‘09 he goes to $6.52 from $6.26. (The Street consensus is $5.20 for this year and $6.36 for next year.) Sacconaghi now expects Apple to sell 8.5 million iPhones for the rest of the calendar year, bringing his forecasted total for all of 2008 to 11 million units; he expects 19.5 million units to be sold in calendar ‘09. (Or if you like fiscal years better, he sees 8.7 million in FY ‘08 and 17.3 million or FY ‘09.)

A farm made up of racks and stacks of hypervisors is incredibly cost efficient, and can allow servers to be brought up and down on short notice in order to scale to meet user demand.  That kind of flexibility is a powerful IT operations enabler, especially for businesses with significant user load spikes. 

F2Q08 Earnings Call

Like The Wisdom of Clouds author James Urquhart, I was floored by the cloud computing meme explosion.  What was an initial comment about Who will Ride the Clouds was picked up by tech visionary Nicholas Carr Monday, in addition to several new media outlets.

Life at Apple without Jobs may be more than just a hypothetical. The 53-year-old Silicon Valley pioneer had a malignant tumor removed from his pancreas four years ago. With fresh concerns about his health following his gaunt appearance at the World Wide Developers Conference two weeks ago, it’s fair to ask: who’s on that executive team — and which ones have a shot at ruling Apple once Jobs leaves (even if he exits years from now and not for health reasons)?

Pacific Crest’s Andy Hargreaves Monday morning raised his price target on Apple (AAPL) to $235 from $225, and upped his EPS estimate for the September 2009 fiscal year to $6.55 from $6.20. The moves reflect his bullish views on the prospects for the iPhone.

Hargreaves contends the new business model for the phone improves near-term cash flow, but does change the overall profitability of the device. He says the initial subsidy - which he puts at $350 per unit, higher than the $325 estimate calculated by Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner - will roughly offset the net present value of monthly payments the company received from AT&T (T) under the model used for the first version of the phone.

Vista Woes

After a painful year running Vista (MSFT) I want need a dependable lightweight laptop with amazing battery life. So I did the once unthinkable: considered getting a Mac. In the past two weeks I’ve visited the Apple store twice to checkout and ask some questions about the Mac Air. I would have bought it the second time, but it was the South Beach store and it seemed the price was a couple hundred dollars higher than in Dallas (no surprise there).

The recent paranoia over the health of Steve Jobs has been taken way out of proportion and is in need of correct perspective. Apple (AAPL) will survive without him. All great institutions do just fine without their founders. Under many circumstance the founder/visionary is not even the best leader for ensuing growth phases. We all applaud Mr. Jobs for his innovative work at Apple but even he has made mistakes. He launched the first iPhone with a faulty price plan. He has struggled to get television shows and digital movies to the mainstream. He was probably 10 years late in getting Windows on the Mac. There is no doubt that he is a creative genius who produces top notch products but the scoreboard shows that no Apple product, beside the iPod, can claim even 10% global market share.

There’s no coolness metric so these observations are totally subjective. But appears that Dell has definitely improved its product design capabilities and can generate some product lust. I’m presently window shopping for a laptop so I’ve been paying more attention to design and what company delivers the goods. I’ve been a Dell customer in the past and unlike some of you I haven’t had a bad experience. My last three PCs have been Dells. I’ve also purchased a few Apples.

According to the Wall Street Journal, HP is looking to cut five printing divisions to three. The Idaho Statesman first reported the story.

Last week, I wrote about the debut of Glassdoor, a company-rating site from Rich Barton, who also founded Expedia and Zillow. The idea is to provide a TripAdvisor-like place for employees to rate their own companies and management, and open the results up to anyone. (The one catch -- you have to do a rating in order to see the other ratings.)

IBM (IBM) on Tuesday touted that its supercomputer built for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Los Alamos National Lab is the most powerful system in the world. It sustained 1.02 petaflops or a 1.02 quadrillian calculations per second.

Below, I offer my initial earnings forecast for Apple's Fiscal 3Q ending on June 30, 2008. While this forecast is likely to moderately change in the coming weeks as channel checks and research reports are released to the public, the forecast will probably remain relatively the same.

Here at the opening keynotes addresses for the HP (HPQ) Technology Forum event at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas, it's a bigger crowd than I was expecting. Lots of old Unix shops still supporting the legacy and mission critical apps and platforms but on increasingly commoditized hardware ... that increasingly needs better management.

Toss in a surge of interest in virtualization, ongoing ramp-ups to Service Oriented Architecture [SOA] and a budding fascination in cloud computing methods, and we're looking at the means to accommodate (at lower TCO) all the old and new of IT systems, platforms, framework, applications and delivery services. That takes data center transformation, and not just adding more servers. We also need the means to manage the complexity, fragility, scale and cost.