Here's a reminder to our readers. Apple will announce the financial results of 2008's third quarter at the end of the day today, approximately 4:30pm EDT.

Shortly thereafter (approximately 5:00 PM EDT), Apple will hold a live conference call to discuss the announcement. We'll be live blogging that call right here, so be sure and check it out. Also, you can follow along with Apple's live audio stream here.

Dust off your portfolios, stockholders! It's time to see what you've bought yourselves.

motionVFX, a new source of templates for Apple Motion, is offering 2d and 3d templates prepped at 1920x1080 and 24fps. The 10 second clips are downloadable for $10, so I took one for a spin.

There are rare circumstances when I would use a template for a finished piece, and motionVFX has a relatively small (but growing) starting selection which limits the chances that I'll find anything "perfect" for a current project. However, I love getting inside of other people's work to figure out new ways of doing things and the template I picked was well done, well organized and I did actually learn some new tricks.

The site navigation is mostly intuitive, but lacking in a few features. The previews are quick and helpful, but I miss the "lightbox" functionality found on most stock sites. Maybe they'll get to that as the collection grows. Checkout with Paypal is great for me, but the offsite credit card processing breaks from the overall professional look of the site. The fact that I was quite happy with my purchase made that a moot point for me, though.

motionVFX is offering TUAW lovers a special discount... 25% off of your purchase, including their high-res stock photos, with unlimited use through the end of February. Just enter the coupon code "J2LGR7" at checkout. And because I care about our readers, I tested that too. It works.

OK, I get it. Equity investments are bets on the future, not rewards for the past, and a stock like Apple's with such stratospheric growth over the past 12 months is vulnerable to gloomy outlooks in a way that more plodding investments might not be. Still and all: another record quarter. Best sales, best revenue in Apple's history. More than 2.3 million Macs sold, and nearly as many iPhones (!). Over twenty-two million freakin' iPods. Year over year, the December quarter gained almost 2.5 billion dollars in revenue -- my goodness, it was a 9.6B quarter, which would have been a spectacular entire year for the Apple of recent memory. Apple beat the internal guidance by $0.34 a share... there's no way to describe this financial performance except "stunningly good" -- unless you're Doug Krizner of Marketplace Morning Report, who characterized the results today as "less than stellar." Man, I am so happy they made that guy stop signing off with "Make it a good day," because the way he said it made me want to get back in bed and hide my money under a mattress.

But I digress. With these results in mind, why would after-hours traders respond with the fiscal equivalent of "Go crawl in a hole and die, you hippie freaks?" Granted, Apple's CFO is anticipating earnings per share for next quarter around a dollar, which is less than analysts were hoping for and may point to some drag on the business from deteriorating economic conditions. It still seems to me that with iPhone revenue growing (remember, it takes two years to extract all the profit from those iPhone sales, so there's an upslope out there as the sales and new markets accumulate) and new streams coming in from iTunes rentals and the so-hot-it's-untouchable retail operation, we've gone from irrational exuberance to a gang initiation beatdown.

Oh well. If I wanted peace and quiet I probably should have bought Dell stock.

Disclaimer: I hold shares in AAPL. Bought them at a split-adjusted $13. Not selling, either.

I'm not Wall Street wunderkind but it doesn't take Warren Buffet to know that Apple's stock has been performing well. It would seem that, at least according to the New York Times, Apple's performance coupled with Google and RIM has lead to many mutual funds seeing extraordinary growth this year. Many funds are glad they didn't sell all their Apple stock when it seems that it just couldn't go any higher (how high can it go? I have no idea, but since I don't own any Apple stock it really matters little to me).

We've been talking a lot about Apple's remarkably strong 4th quarter results here on TUAW, but with the recent gains Apple passed an important milestone. Apple has a larger market capitalization than IBM, meaning simply that Apple is now the most valuable computer hardware maker in the world. Let me say that again: Apple is, as of this writing, trading above $185 per share giving it a market cap of $161b, compared to IBM at $153b, HP at $133b and Dell at a measly $65b. When you put it that way it seems almost preposterous, but the numbers are what they are. Of course, all the standard provisos about market cap apply, but nonetheless I'm sure they're savoring this in Cupertino.

Tuesday was a rough day for Apple investors, as shares dropped precipitously from post-earnings-report highs of $148 a share down into the low $130s. Most of the credit/blame for the selloff is being attributed to a rumor floated among traders and on a posting at TheStreet.com that Apple was cutting back iPhone production by 50% off the company's original plans.

Most of the potential sources later disavowed the information. Considering that there has never been an official production target other than the "10 million phones by 2008" number (note also that a production cut was not discussed during the earnings call), longtime Apple stock watchers on the Mac Observer forums characterized the bear run on AAPL as a "deliberate hit," executed by unscrupulous persons who have positioned themselves to take advantage of the drop in value to shore up their holdings.

Remember, AAPL investors, it's a marathon, not a sprint.

via Apple 2.0 and BloggingStocks

Disclaimer: I hold a position in AAPL.

Even as the market at large turned downward at the open today, AAPL moved up in a big way. With overnight trading taking the stock on a roller-coaster ride (up over $150, settling down at about $145, almost $8 over the closing price Wednesday), the stock opened this morning at 146, a record high open and intraday record high.

If you listened to yesterday's earnings call (or followed the highlights on our liveblog) you heard a lot of interest about the initial days of iPhone sales, which barely made it into the June quarter numbers; Apple's not even recognizing revenue from AT&T subscription sharing until the September quarter. Meanwhile, the Mac and iPod businesses are, as they say in Pittsburgh, "ahn fahr" -- 32% Mac unit sales growth over the year-ago quarter, and nearly 10 million iPods sold in the quarter. Check out Georges Yared and his colleagues over at our sister shop BloggingStocks for more on the earnings story.

Disclaimer: I am long on AAPL, and short on temper.

The charts tell the story: AAPL is feeling the iPhone bump. Even without today's $2 runup on the on-again/off-again iPhone Nano rumors (triggering a busy day: 14% more AAPL trades than usual), the stock is now solidly up 55% year to date, putting Apple's market capitalization as of today's close hovering near $115 billion. Whatever aggravation or gripes one might have with Apple's newest product, it's clear that Wall Street is feeling the iPhone love in a big way.

Something really interesting might happen this week if the spike continues: Apple, Inc. market value may soon surpass that of the company where Steve & Steve got their start: Hewlett-Packard. HP's market cap is $117B, by no means out of reach considering the circumstances. (Of course, Google's market cap is over $162B... but that's just craziness.)

Disclaimer: I hold Apple, Inc. stock. Split-adjusted, I bought it at about $13. Never give up -- never surrender.

Uh oh, it looks like Apple might have dumped the majority of their iPhones into brick and mortar stores, making web shoppers wait longer than usual for a new device. The online Apple Store currently displays a 2-4 week shipping time for both 4GB and 8GB iPhones. While this could simply be an overestimation to help manage the demand, it might be motivation for more users to try their luck if they have a local Apple or AT&T store. Just remember: only one phone per customer is allowed at AT&T stores, while Apple has a cap of 2, and you can always check your local Apple Store's iPhone stock from the comforts of your pajamas before making the trek.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

Our favorite stock just keeps going up, and earlier this week Apple Inc. broke the $100 billion market capitalization barrier. With the stock price heading over $116 a share, the value of the company continues to climb. And analysts remain bullish, with Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty talking about a near doubling of the market cap within the next 12 months as a viable possibility. Of course this would hinge on the success of the iPhone plus expanding Mac market share, but at this point nobody wants to bet against Cupertino. Unable to deny themselves a little schadenfreude, many on the Mac web are noting that this puts Apple (~$102b at the time of this writing) well above Dell's market cap (~$61b), and closing in on HP (~$122b) and IBM (~$158b). Only Microsoft remains way out in front (~$292b).

[via AppleInsider]

If your stock ticker symbol is RIMM or PALM, today would have been a good day to stay in bed. The trend noted in this Engadget post from 2 pm ET kept on going through the trading session, with Blackberry-maker Research in Motion losing nearly 8% on the NASDAQ and 7.7% on the Toronto exchange. Palm suffered nearly as badly, with Nokia and Motorola posting much smaller declines. For the homes of the Treo and the Pearl, "Black Tuesday" represented a total loss of market value approaching $2.2 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Apple's one-button bounce on the day was a stunning $6.1 billion.

Seems that Wall Street got Steverino's message loud and clear; he expects to take his 1% of cellphone market share right off the top, and he is definitely playing for keeps.

I'm guessing that this "Sponsored by Blackberry" ad button won't be showing up on any more CNET videos, either.

Thanks Florian!

Sources have informed The Financial Times of London that the forged documents at the center of the ongoing SEC investigation relate to illegal activities surrounding options given to Steven Jobs. According to the FT story, Jobs "was handed 7.5m stock options in 2001 without the required authorization from the company's board of directors." and that "Records that purported to show a full board meeting had taken place to approve Mr Jobs' remuneration, as required by Apple's procedures, were later falsified."

If this is in fact the case, it certainly makes sense that Jobs would seek his own external legal counsel both to more closely protect his personal interests as well as put some distance between himself and the company as a whole.

Update: The FT article makes no mention of wrong doing by Jobs himself, and as such this post has been updated.

[via Cult of Mac]

Alyce Lomax, blogging over at the Motley Fool, discusses her take on Apple's stock performance. Over the last five years, Apple has boomed -- up 715%. Lomax believes that Apple has not yet peaked. She sees growth opportunities in the Intel line of Macs along with the strong performance of the iPod.

So should you buy Apple? We here at TUAW haven't a clue. But Lomax's article is an interesting read for those of you following the stock market. As for us, we tend to go with the whole monkey and dartboard method.

Apple's ongoing investigation into its stock option grants has delayed its SEC 10-K filing. The filing, which was due yesterday, may be delayed for as much as a month.

If you recall, Apple admitted that employee stock options may have been been backdated. Companies use backdating in order to lower the apparent value of the issued stocks. Although news reports suggest this isn't illegal, the backdating has to be accounted for and disclosed to investors and so forth. CEO Steve Jobs was reportedly aware of the backdating and Apple's investigation is ongoing.

Apple doomed? That's what David Keppelmeyer thinks. Blogging at DanAquariam, Keppelmeyer suggests that a combination of financial underperformance, ongoing legal challenges and increased competition belies Apple's strong stock performance. Of course, we are talking about an article here that says Microsoft's Zune "is a huge blow to Apple" so you may want to carefully consider the source of this doom-and-gloom-prediction as you read through the article.

Us? We're pretty bullish on Apple, but then again, you've got to consider our inclinations too.