Apple Shares Cross $200; Let The Rumors Fly
As Apple (AAPL) shares crossed the $200 mark today for the first time ever, the rumor mill is cranking out plenty of grist for CEO Steve Jobs's keynote at the Macworld convention in San Francisco, which runs January 14 through 18.
Context & Ripple Effects
The $200 print caps a run that began with the iPhone launch in January 2007 and the AT&T exclusivity that came with it — by October, Apple was already worth more than IBM, and the same-day PC World piece shows the stock had been flirting with the mark before clearing it intraday at $198.95 at the close.
What makes this milestone more than a ticker note is what sits behind it: a confirmed News Corp/Fox deal for an online video-on-demand service, a rumored six-months-in-the-making portable device, and a year in which Apple and Google displaced AT&T and Verizon as the center of gravity in telephony. All of it feeds speculation for Steve Jobs's Macworld keynote, January 14-18.
First-order effects
- Investors are now pricing Macworld expectations directly into AAPL — the rumor mill around Jobs's keynote becomes a live input to the stock through mid-January.
- The Fox video-on-demand signing gives Apple a studio anchor for its media push heading into the keynote window.
Second-order effects
- Other studios face pressure to follow News Corp onto Apple's video service or risk ceding digital film distribution terms to a single buyer.
- AT&T's iPhone exclusivity keeps carriers reacting to Apple's product cadence rather than setting their own handset roadmaps.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple's valuation is being re-rated on phones plus media distribution rather than PCs — each hardware category it enters resets the multiple the market will pay.
- The pre-keynote rumor cycle hardens into a recurring feature of the stock's calendar, rewarding analysts who aggregate supply-chain and sourcing chatter months ahead of announcements.
The trend: Apple's successive share-price records are tracking its expansion from computers into telephony and paid media distribution, with each Macworld keynote functioning as a scheduled catalyst.