Bloomberg is reporting that Steve Jobs will not attend this week's Apple shareholder meeting. That's not a big surprise -- Jobs' health has kept him from attending recent usual events, including Macworld earlier this year. But it is the first time in the over 10 years since he rejoined the company that he won't be appearing at the annual meeting.

Additionally, at this week's meeting, as usual, shareholders will vote on whether or not to re-elect Apple's directors to their one-year terms, including Jobs, though nothing is expected to change -- the company has remained strongly in support of Jobs as leader, even if they haven't talked about his health as much as some investors may have liked. COO Tim Cook will likely run most of the planned activities during the meeting.

We'll keep an eye on any news that comes out of the closed meeting (streams and transcripts won't be available, but there will be reporters in attendance), and let you know what we hear. As always, we wish Jobs and his company and family the best of health, and hope he is able to feel better soon.

[via CNET]

Yesterday, Apple released a proxy statement detailing the financial compensation that executives enjoy as part of their participation on the board of directors.

Steve Jobs retained his $1 salary for 2008, but has over 5.5 million shares of Apple stock, which is worth over $500 million on paper. Jobs is worth about $5.7 billion, thanks largely to the fact that he's Disney's largest individual shareholder. Fidelity Investments continues to be Apple's largest investor with over 46 million shares of stock.

There are five shareholder proposals up for voting this time around:

• Proposal 1 asks to re-elect the board of directors, consisting of Steve Jobs, William Campbell, Millard Drexler, Al Gore, Andrea Jung, Arthur Levinson, Eric Schmidt, and Jerry York.
• Proposal 2 asks for more transparency surrounding Apple's political contributions.
• Proposal 3 asks the company to adopt a statement supporting universal health care for everyone, and not just employees.
• Proposal 4 asks the company to release a report on corporate strategies surrounding climate change and greenhouse gas emissions before July.
• Proposal 5 asks to adopt a policy that gives shareholders more input on executive compensation. (Thanks, Scott!)

The board of directors, perhaps not surprisingly, recommends approving the first proposal, and rejecting the other four.

The proxy statement is available from Apple's Investor Relations website, and will not be mailed to shareholders unless requested.

[Via MacDailyNews.]

This is very interesting -- while investors and consumers alike are panicking every time someone says "Jobs" and "sick" in the same sentence, MacLife has decided to take a more optimistic view of the prospect of His Steveness leaving the company, by compiling a nice list of ten Apple products they say Jobs had nothing at all to do with. As you probably already know, Steve left the company once before, from 1985 to 1996, and during that time, while Steve was working on NeXTstep (which would eventually become OS X), Apple didn't exactly sit on its laurels.

The Newton is first and foremost, and while some may laugh at the handwriting recognition, let's not forget that it can still do things the iPhone can't. And while many of Apple's products were finalized under Jobs' watch, their beginnings come from before his return: the Powerbook, Macintosh TV (which could definitely be seen as a precursor for the AppleTV), and the Power Macintosh were all released without Jobs. Even among the most faithful Apple fans, you have to agree that Apple is willing to get wacky without Jobs to squelch some really crazy ideas: the Twentieth Anniversary Mac, the eMate, and the adjustable keyboard are all examples of that.

Of course, you could definitely argue that Apple's most popular products (iPods, the iPhone, the MacBook lines) wouldn't have happened without Jobs. But there's something to be said for Apple sans Jobs, too. "The Power to Be Your Best" might not be quite as memorable as "Think Different," but it's got its own charm.

Apple shares today dropped to an intra-day 52-week low of a penny over $75, and rebounded to close at $80.49 per share. That was down 5.8 points from yesterday's close.

This marks the lowest prices for Apple stock since the introduction of the iPhone in early 2007. Many stocks lost ground today in a broad market selloff that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average down nearly 445 points.

Marketwatch.com's Rex Crum says that AAPL has lost "the iPhone premium": That is, whatever gains the company made since the introduction of the popular handset. Apple shares hit a peak of almost $203 per share late last year, but those days are long gone.

If there's a silver lining to this gray cloud, it's that now might be a good time to buy. Macworld Expo is coming in January. In years past, the stock price has risen in anticipation of product announcements at the expo, leading to a selling frenzy the day of the keynote.

Of course, past performance does not necessarily indicate future results. In this market, who knows?

In heavy trading volume today, Apple stock (AAPL) is down four percent after initially dropping to 176.23 halfway through the keynote at 1:55 p.m. Eastern time.

At the time of posting, AAPL was trading near 177, which is a decline of over four percent since the closing bell yesterday Friday. (It's been a long day.)

Apple stock has taken hits in the past on announcement days, usually due to traders looking to make a quick buck from the high interest surrounding coverage of the event.

An update, after the jump.

We are in the process of liveblogging Apple's financial conference call, but Apple has already posted their quarterly results for all to read. Here's what Apple sold this quarter:

• 2,319,000 Macs (44% more than last quarter)
• 22,121,000 iPods (5% more than last quarter)
• 2,315,000 iPhones

Revenues clocked in at $9.6 billion and a net profit of $1.58 billion.

Best. Quarter. Ever.

Blockbuster and Netflix's stocks both took big hits based on what we just heard Steve say at Macworld. Blockbuster has dropped a handy 15%, and Netflix "tumbled 6 percent" already this afternoon (although it's jumped back a bit since then), according to CNN Money. Apparently investors are convinced that movie renters would rather fire up iTunes than run out to the video store or wait for a movie to come in on their Netflix queue.

Apple, however, isn't doing that well either after today's announcement. On the day, they've dropped almost $11 as of this writing. But while this Keynote may not quite have met expectations (lots of people were expecting Cinema upgrades, or something a little less traditional than the MacBook Air), this very likely isn't an actual downturn in the ol' Apple hype -- anyone can see that iTunes movie rentals will very likely make them a lot of money. Rather, it's probably* the result of Keynote investors selling off the stock they picked up before the event. In short, it'll take a lot more than an afternoon to see what effect today's announcements really have on stock prices.

*All of this commentary and analysis is given by someone who has little to no experience in stock trading, and should not be taken seriously by anyone.

Matt Haughey has worked up a little analysis/thought experiment of just how much money could be made by buying stocks before every Macworld Keynote of the past ten years-- he calls it the Keynote Index Fund, and has the stock prices before every keynote, directly after every 'note, and a day after every 'note.

And the fact is that buying the stock a day before and holding it for 48 hours (until the day after) would have made you money over the past ten years-- he calculates 1.2% growth over 24-hour period, and 2.2% growth over a 48 hour period. Of course, that doesn't hold a candle to what you would have earned if you just kept Apple stock the whole time (holding on to $10,000 of Apple stock since 1997 would have you holding shares worth $525,187 today).

But the fact is that Macworld keynotes can make wily stock traders money. The worst performing keynote so far was in 2005, when only the Mac mini and the shuffle were announced, and the best was last year, when the iPhone was first introduced. So just standard common sense just tells you that if the iUltraportable does appear, you could probably make money with a little day trading*, but if it doesn't show up (and there are no other major announcements), you could take the worst bath so far on the Keynote Index Fund.

*This advice is given by a nonprofessional and should not be listened to under any circumstances or by anyone-- past performance of a stock means nothing to future performance. Plus, I'm still hungover from New Year's Eve, and in no condition to give stock tips anyway.

[Via Waxy]

Apple Insider has an analyst saying that 10% of iPhones sold in Apple stores in September were being bought by people who are then turning around and selling them unlocked. That seems like a big number when you picture the situation Gene Munster, the analyst, describes: "one Apple employee acknowledged that customers were buying five iPhones per store visit in order to turn around and resell them unlocked."

But is it really that big? 90% of people buying iPhones are sticking with AT&T, so considering that Apple got the support of a network and a slice of the service plan profits, a number like 10% of unlocks actually seems to me like it validates Apple's choice to sell the phone locked. SDKs, jailbreaks, and customer rights (oh my) aside, if only 10% of iPhones out there are unlocked (and the number's probably much lower, as all the iPhones sold before September were probably not unlocked at all), Apple's original decision was justified, in my view.

But I'm not defending them for breaking things with 1.1.1. Apple hasn't released the numbers on September sales yet, but 10% of a lot is still a lot, in terms of bricked iPhones because of the unlock crackdown. I haven't heard any tales of folks who paid a lot for an unlocked iPhone and then got a brick with the 1.1.1 update, but I'm sure they're out there and unhappy.

Nine bigwigs at Taiwan's Inventec Appliances could be headed to jail over allegations of insider trading-- the executives allegedly failed to report lowered order numbers by Apple before dropping off $22.4 million worth of stock on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Apparently, Apple decided to send more of its iPod order to China, and the executives reportedly knew in mid-January that the decision had been made to do so. But they didn't reveal the troubles until mid-March, at which point IA's stock tumbled, and the execs had already reportedly unloaded their stock.

In other executives and stock news, Jobsy picked up a few Apple shares this week-- 120,000 for $5.75 a piece. The stock price has actually been dropping since around August 1st, but considering the price is right around $117 right now, Steve is sitting pretty-- it's good to be the king. Apple says Jobs isn't selling at this time, though. Obviously-- he's got to wait until the ultraportable shows up, right?

[via MacBytes]

According to the Dow Jones Marketwatch, apparently Apple's earnings last quarter are going to be much higher thanks to something called the iPhone. You probably haven't heard much about this device, but our sources tell us it's some sort of hybrid between a Personal Digital Assistant and one of those phones you can use in your car.

Investors are cooing about the tiny "iPhone", because even though it only appeared on Apple's quarterly cycle for two days, the estimated 500,000 units sold in the first weekend will probably be listed as at least partly responsible for the 34% rise in AAPL's profits. The iPod didn't do too badly either-- everyone's expecting Apple to announce that around 10 million iPods were sold last quarter also.

And not surprisingly, bigger things are on the way-- one analyst says "the iPhone will have an even stronger halo effect than the iPod on Macintosh's market share." If two days of the iPhone can do this much, how big will AAPL get with a whole quarter of the gadget?

Yesterday AAPL continued its upward growth. The stock gained 36 cents to $100.76 according to Forbes. Apple was one of several Internet stocks trading higher yesterday including Real Networks and Amazon.com. So will investors continue to hold onto their AAPL stock or will they cash out for profit? TUAW remains completely agnostic on the matter so we turn this over to you. What are your thoughts, stock-investing readers?

Our sister blog BloggingStocks brings us a story about analyst Fred Hickey who recommended shorting Apple Inc back in January. People who took Hickey at his word, when AAPL traded at $85.94, would have had to pay $102.20 to cover the short position, or about a 19% loss.

Ouch.

So will Apple continue its growth? S&P analyst Scott Kessler thinks APPL shares may rise to $125 over the next year. At yesterday's Financials Q2 2007 conference call, Apple said to expect revenue to dip seasonally during Q3.

The Mercury News reports that Apple is offering to give employees cash instead of previously-granted stock options in order to avoid tax-related penalties for those employees affected by backdated stock options. As you might recall, Apple recently came under a cloud for backdating their stock options to lower their value. At least with cash, employees will be able to record exactly the amount received rather than their perceived worth.