Here are your Apple rumors and AAPL stock news items for Tuesday:
Amazon Cloud Music Player Evaporates from Apple App Store: Amazon‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Cloud Drive lets users store large amounts of digital music on the retailer’s servers. Interactive Innovative Solutions’ “aMusic” app offered in the Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) App Store for use on the iPhone and iPad lets owners of those devices stream music from their Amazon Cloud Drive accounts. It’s an entrepreneurial work around Apple’s strict rules on distributing competing media services via the App Store. That is, it would be if Interactive Innovative Solutions wasn’t forced to remove the app from the store. Evolver.fm (via Apple Insider) reported on Tuesday that the app’s creator, James Clancey, had to remove the app because of legal problems. Although he didn’t specify exactly what legal problems caused the app’s removal, he did suggest that it was music labels and not Apple or Amazon that pressed the issue. Clancey said, “Labels were not too pleased with the way this app united Amazon’s cloud music lockers with Apple’s iOS devices,” according to the report.
Apple Spending Big on Cloud, Retail in 2012: What’s coming next year from Cupertino, Calif.’s big cheese? The iPad 3? The iPhone 5? How about that newfangled Apple HDTV? All strong candidates for release next year, sure, but that’s what Apple is going to be making money with. What is Apple going to be spending on with its more than $76 billion? Cloud computing technology and retail expansion, according to a Monday report from Giga Om. The company is expecting to drop $8 billion in capital expenditures next year, compared to just $3.4 billion in 2011. UBS analyst Maynard Um, referring to Apple’s recently filed 10-K, noted that Apple will spend $900 million on retail expansion, with plans to open 40 new stores in 2012, 75% of which will be based outside of the United States. The remaining $7.1 billion is earmarked for “product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software, and enhancements.” As Giga Om writer Erica Ogg notes, “information systems hardware, software, and enhancements” likely refers to the expansion of Apple’s data center in North Carolina and its overall data storage/cloud business.
Google Brings Gmail App to iPhone: Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) offers perfectly usable versions of its tools like email service Gmail on Apple’s portable devices, but those services are predominantly only accessible through the web browser on the iPhone and iPad. Now Gmail’s 260 million users will have an app of their very own. A Monday report at 9 to 5 Mac said the technology company is very close to releasing a full-featured Gmail app for the iPhone. That said, Apple reportedly hasn’t approved the app yet, so it might be some time before it’s finally available to the public.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at @ajohnagnello and become a fan of InvestorPlace on Facebook.
