San Francisco
The Economic Times
Apple’s developer conference on Monday gave investors a new opportunity to see the company at work without Steve Jobs. The company unveiled a faster iPhone and cut prices on its MacBook Pro notebooks, relying on a team of managers to tout the products while its chief executive officer is on medical leave.
The absence of Jobs let Apple make the case that the company is built on more than one man, said Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis. Jobs, 54, is scheduled to return to Apple at the end of the month.
“We look forward to Steve returning at the end of June,” Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, said on Monday. Instead of seeing Jobs, the roughly 5,200 attendees watched a presentation by marketing chief Phil Schiller. The 12-year Apple veteran was joined by iPhone chief Scott Forstall and Bertrand Serlet, senior vice-president for software.
Schiller used the appearance to present faster, lower-priced MacBook Pro laptops. He also showed off the new iPhone 3G S, which runs applications and opens Web pages up to twice as fast as the year-old iPhone 3G. Two versions of the iPhone 3G S will go on sale in the US on June 19, with prices starting at $199 for a 16-gigabyte model.
Apple also will continue to sell the 8-gigabyte iPhone 3G, offering it for $99 — half its old price. The new phones may help Apple fend off fresh competition from Research In Motion’s BlackBerry and Palm’s Pre. Palm introduced the Pre on June 6, touting the speed of its software as a selling point. Apple has sold more than 40 million iPhones and iPod Touch media players. There are now more than 50,000 software applications, or apps, available for the devices.
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