No Blockbuster at Apple Developers Conference; Stock Skids
Razor-thin Macbook Pro with eye-popping high definition; a new mobile operating system; more languages for Siri. Those were some of the takeaways from the opening day at Apple's highly anticipated developers conference.
But Wall Street's greeting: "Ho-hum."
Before the conference opened Monday, Apple stock broke through its 50-day moving average level of $582.79 a share, but later fell below it. It closed down $9.15 a share or 1.58 percent.
Apple opened the conference by unveiling the ultra-thin Macbook Pro with a stunning high definition "Retina display."
The redesigned Macbook Pro is 0.71 inch, rivaling the MacBook Air in thinness, and weighs only 4.46 pounds, marketing director Phil Schiller said. It also has high-definition "Retina display," with a resolution of 2,880 by 1,880 pixels, he said.
"The new MacBook Pro is the most advanced Mac we have ever built,” CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.
The 15.4 inch display model (with a 2.3 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.3 GHz, 8GB of memory and 256GB of flash storage) starts at $2,199, Apple said. It will have seven hours of battery life.
In a wide-ranging update of its products, Applealso announced that it has begun shipping its new MacBook Air, and that its iOS 6, to launch this fall, will have greater integration with Facebook. With public API, Facebook integration will be easier for developers. Facebook birthdays and events will appear in the calendar, and Facebook phone numbers will appear in contacts.
In a move that counters Google's Android phones, Apple said its mobile iOS 6 operating system also will have its own map system featuring 3D and flyover views, including local search, turn-by-turn navigation, incident reports and integration with Siri, the "personal assistant" in the iPhone.
To much applause, Apple officials announced that Siri will be getting more languages, including Spanish, Mandarin and Korean. In addition, Siri will include movie information from rottentomatoes.com and have restaurant information, sports stats and trivia.
Siri is also coming to the new iPad.
Some of the new products were made available on the Apple Store website.
In his first keynote at the conference since the death of Steve Jobs in October, Cook told the conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center that customers have downloaded 30 billion apps. He said Apple has paid out more than $5 billion to developers, and will have 155 countries for its app store soon, up 32.
Cook said Apple has more than 400 million accounts on the app store with credit cards and single-click buying.
Apple said the new MacBook Pro Retina display is the world’s highest resolution notebook display with over 5 million pixels, 3 million more than an HD television.
"At 220 pixels-per-inch, the Retina display’s pixel density is so high the human eye cannot distinguish individual pixels from a normal viewing distance, so text and graphics look incredibly sharp," Apple said in a statement. "The Retina display uses IPS technology for a 178-degree wide viewing angle, and has 75 percent less reflection and 29 percent higher contrast than the previous generation."
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, where the company previously unveiled new software for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, runs through Friday. The conference sold out in an hour and 43 minutes, Cook said. Some 5,000 people are attending at a cost of $1,600 each.
Before Cook took the stage, the conference opened with a comedy routine by Siri asking: "How many developers does it take to change a light bulb? None. That's a hardware problem."
CNBC's Jon Fortt contributed to this story.
email: tech@cnbc.com
