Icahn spoke again with Apple"s Cook on stock buyback - CNBC
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NEW YORK
NEW YORK Nov 11 (Reuters) – Activist investor Carl Icahn has spoken with Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook again to discuss a potential stock buyback, cable television network CNBC reported on Monday.
Icahn, who has demanded a $ 150 billion buyback publicly and privately to Apple’s Cook since August, had a good conversation with Cook and they both continue to believe the company is undervalued, CNBC reported.
Icahn owns roughly 4.7 million shares in the technology giant; he revealed on Aug. 13 that his investment firm had a “large position” in Apple. He has said that Apple shares could trade at $ 700 with a larger stock buyback.
Apple shares were down 0.36 percent at $ 518.70 in afternoon trading on Monday.
Icahn and Apple were not immediately available for comment.
Icahn also said that he hoped offshore driller Transocean would raise its stock dividend further in the future, CNBC reported.
Switzerland-based Transocean said Monday that it had reached an agreement with Icahn to pay out a $ 3 dividend and reduce its maximum number of board seats to 11 from 14.
Icahn, who disclosed a 5.6 percent stake in the company in January, had previously pressed for a $ 4 per share dividend. Transocean shares were up 3.8 percent at $ 55.5 in afternoon trading.
Network World – When Apple announced its new iPhone 5s last week, the fingerprint scanning technology, called Touch ID, stood out as one of
the most notable additions. The benefits are easy enough to identify – iPhone users will no longer need to repeatedly type
in an annoying security PIN code to unlock their phones or download apps or media from iTunes.
Even better, those who have tried the technology first-hand seem to be largely satisfied. However, before designating the iPhone’s new security feature a win, a few issues need to be considered.
Just over a year ago, a report published on Elcomsoft’s blog cracking passwords highlighted “a huge security hole” with fingerprint reader security in laptops sold by 16 companies, including
Acer, ASUS, Dell, IBM and Samsung. The fingerprint-reading software that came preinstalled on these laptops stored the Windows
user passwords in plain text, according to the report. This violated a pretty basic security policy, which Microsoft itself
advises its users to adopt – don’t store Windows passwords on the PC.
Of course, this is just one example, and it’s since been resolved. Still, at the time, the vulnerability was considered “extremely
broad” by the researchers who found it, as it somehow made it past Microsoft and the 16 manufacturers that shipped the laptops.
Worse still, the software responsible for the flaw was owned by Authentec, the biometric company that Apple bought for $ 356 million last year so it could develop fingerprint sensor technology for
the iPhone 5s. Small world.
RELATED: First hands-on impressions of new iPhones
First look: Apple iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C
In an opinion piece at Wired, security technologist and author Bruce Schneier declared that Apple’s fingerprint authentication technology “almost certainly” can be hacked. Although he hadn’t used the technology
himself, Schneier deduced that it would be difficult for Apple to create a biometric system that was entirely protected.
Schneier points to the complexity of biometric security, namely the fact that fingerprints are not that difficult to find.
How exactly the iPhone 5s fingerprint sensor can be hacked is still unclear, but Schneier seriously doubts that it will be
entirely secure.
“I’m sure that someone with a good enough copy of your fingerprint and some rudimentary materials engineering capability —
or maybe just a good enough printer — can authenticate his way into your iPhone,” Schneier wrote.
More important than security, though, is reliability. Schneier mentioned the typical technology user’s tendency to ditch new
technology that doesn’t immediately work as well as they’d hoped. Apple is no stranger to this phenomenon, having already
seen Siri become something of a laughing stock. If users hit similar snags with the new fingerprint sensor, they will simply
default to the PIN-based authentication system they’re all used to.
“If it’s true that Apple’s new iPhone will have biometric security, the designers have presumably erred on the side of ensuring
that the user can always get in,” Schneier wrote. “Failures will be more common in cold weather, when your shriveled fingers
just got out of the shower, and so on. But there will certainly still be the traditional PIN system to fall back on.”
Apple Inc. is a synonym for independence, hipness and originality — but recent setbacks may finally force the icon to rethink its us vs. them mentality when it comes to big battles in Washington and Silicon Valley.
The company marches to its own iTunes, spending little on lobbying, rarely joining trade associations and, in a pattern that’s become more pronounced this summer, refusing to negotiate or settle in many lawsuits.
Experts say Apple’s tried-and-true approach is starting to backfire, as the company has already taken at least one big hit in a high-profile e-books trial. A recent landmark D.C. appearance by CEO Tim Cook may reflect a new reality for Apple: that direct engagement with lawmakers, regulators and rivals is more effective than trying to remain above it all.
(PHOTOS: Politicians and their iToys)
“It’s inevitable,” said a top Washington consultant who works with major tech brands. “Everybody gets a shot at being a fair-haired boy and that can keep the regulators away for a while. But nobody stays favored forever. That’s why you need friends.”
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the record for this story, referring instead to past public statements by Cook and others.
In general, the company’s public remarks can be summed up with a blanket defense of its practices and an insistence that it won’t settle cases in which it considers itself in the right. Apple also rarely brings lawsuits it doesn’t intend to push all the way to trial.
But it has been a rough go of late for the Cupertino, Calif.-based company. Three weeks ago, Apple was found by a federal judge to have orchestrated an e-books price-fixing scheme. The five other book publishers involved settled with the Justice Department, but Apple refused. The company lost at trial and has vowed to appeal.
(Also on POLITICO: Ireland hits back at Apple tax flap)
Apple also appears headed to court in a class-action lawsuit over Silicon Valley hiring practices. Two other co-defendants recently settled.
And later this week, Apple and Samsung expect to learn who has won a patent dispute before the U.S. International Trade Commission. The outlook for Apple is uncertain, given that ITC investigators have already chastised the company for its unwillingness to negotiate a settlement with the South Korean rival.
At his May 21 testimony in the Senate — a moment necessitated by a harsh congressional report about Apple’s offshore tax-avoidance strategies — Cook acknowledged the company’s disengagement from the levers of power.
“While we have never had a large presence in Washington, we are deeply committed to our country’s welfare,” Cook told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the only Hill testimony by an Apple chief executive in the company’s 37-year history. “We believe great public policy can be a catalyst for a better society and a stronger economy.”
The very notion that Cook felt he needed to do what late founder Steve Jobs never did — publicly mollify Congress and, by extension, the American public — showed that the worm may have turned for Apple.
“They were asked many times to come to the Hill and have a conversation, they were asked to testify at hearings — and they wouldn’t even return phone calls,” recalled Christal Sheppard, chief counsel for patent and trademarks for the House Judiciary Committee until 2010. “It proved to be impossible to get them to come to the Hill to testify.”
Corporate reputation consultant Jonathan Bernstein said it hurts Apple to have “the perception of being a go-it-alone, arrogant corporation.”
“They’re going to pay a price in decisions made against them, whether it’s by litigators or prosecutors or the consumer,” he said.
A more standoffish approach worked well when the company was viewed as a renegade, outsider brand determined not to be tamed or forced into conventional business practices. But now that Apple is among the world’s largest, most valuable corporations and a mainstream fixture, its allergy to all sorts of public interaction comes off badly to many.
In the e-books case, Apple stood its ground and refused to settle with the government even after every co-defendant had done so. A judge found that the company had orchestrated a plan with five publishing houses to set a floor on the price of books sold in the iBooks store created for the iPad’s debut. The judge said Apple had done so to force rival e-book seller Amazon not to undercut the market and that doing so kept prices higher for customers. A hearing on a penalty in the case has yet to be scheduled, but Apple has said it will appeal regardless.
Apple has been quietly growing its share of the U.S. e-book market according to its testimony during the current e-book price-fixing court case against it, and now accounts for 20 percent of e-book sales overall stateside (via MacRumors). That’s about twice as much as has been speculated in the past by market-watchers, and it indicates that Apple, while nowhere near the dominant force that Amazon is, might be slowly winning a sizeable chunk of the digital book space.
The news overall comes in a negative context for Apple, which is defending itself against allegations by the government and had to defend the iBookstore from a characterization as a failure, but it’s still good news for the iBooks business, which looks to have a chance to grow even further as Apple delivers desktop support for its digital books via an iBooks application for Mac, shipping with the next release of OS X, 10.9 Mavericks, sometime this fall.
The iBooks arrival on the desktop should be good for consumers, as it provides one more place to read. Cross-platform reach has been the big advantage of competing stores like the Amazon, Nook and Kobo stores so far, and while Apple’s expansion to the Mac still leaves anyone not on Apple devices out of the loop, so it’s unclear how much adoption will spike. But it’s fair to speculate that iBooks has done well on the back of Apple’s increasingly far-reaching presence in education, since texts feature prominently in its promotional efforts around iBooks (and were again on display at the OS X iBooks unveiling at WWDC).
iBooks on the Mac isn’t going to be revolutionary because it lets you pick up where you left off in the latest Game Of Thrones installment on your iPad, since I think a very small portion of people would prefer reading books on their computer vs. on a mobile device. But it will be huge for the education market; in many ways an interactive textbook makes more sense on OS X than it does on iOS, if only because of the greater ability to take extensive notes, view multiple books at once as windowed separate selections, and just generally take better advantage of multiple streams of information.
iBooks is a fine hedge as a consumer-focused e-books platform (it lets Apple claim a more complete ecosystem), but its real lasting value will probably be in education, where it gives Apple a definite leg up on other competing platforms. Others are doing e-textbooks, but Apple has the education pedigree to do it right and spread it fast, and that’s likely what’s behind its iBookstore growth.
April 1, 1976
NASDAQ:AAPL
Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook Air) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod, the…
