AllThingsD » Genius Bar

Time's Ripe for Apple Execs to Enjoy the Fruits of Their Labor

John Paczkowski — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 10:15:50 +0000

With Apple’s shares trading near all-time highs, a few of the company’s top lieutenants are cashing in some of their equity for big paydays. Earlier this month, Bob Mansfield, senior vice president of Macintosh Hardware Engineering, exercised 40,000 stock options with a strike price of $36.54, selling them at $308 apiece to clear $10.8 million.

Now Ron Johnson, Apple’s SVP of Retail Operations, has followed Mansfield’s lead. According to an SEC filing made public over the weekend, Johnson–the guy responsible for putting the Genius Bars in Apple retail stores–exercised 150,000 options at a strike price of $11.73, selling them at an average price of $306.07 per share to pocket $44.1 million.

Rich rewards and well-deserved. Remember, Mac sales accounted for $22 billion in revenue in Apple’s fiscal 2010. That’s 33 percent of the company’s revenue–enough to make its Mac business No. 110 on the Fortune 500 if it were a standalone operation. Mansfield and Johnson did much to make that possible.

An Apple Store in the Apple App Store

John Paczkowski — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:49:16 +0000

Want to shop in the Apple Store? Yes, there’s an app for that, too.

Tuesday morning, Apple (AAPL) released a new iOS application that brings its online store to the iPhone and iPod touch. Using it, you can browse, reserve or purchase products, make reservations at the Genius Bar and sign up for in-store workshops and One to One appointments.

A wise move, putting the Apple Store on the company’s mobile devices. Turning every iPhone into a mobile storefront will certainly do nothing but help sales–and streamline the in-store appointment check-in process as well.

At present, the app is available only for the iPhone and iPod touch and only in the U.S., though I imagine we’ll see iPad and international versions soon enough.

What's Really Going On Behind the Genius Bar

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:25:39 +0000

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)

Zune to Be Forgotten?

John Paczkowski — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:00:40 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Pull Those Engineers Off OS X 10.6 and Put Them on the Clock Radio …

John Paczkowski — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:36:01 +0000

Good thing Forrester Research (FORR) doesn’t run Apple (AAPL), because if it did the company would be well on its way to insolvency.

In an astonishingly unimaginative report called “The Future of Apple Inc.,” Forrester attempts to divine the products Apple will be peddling five years from now. “Apple will aim to become the hub of the digital home, offering eight key products and services to connect PCs and digital content to the HDTV-stereo audio-visual infrastructure in consumers’ homes,” Forrester explains. “To fulfill this strategy, we predict that Apple will launch new products, re-engineer the Apple Store, and expand into in-home installation services.”

Sadly, the speculative product and services roadmap Forrester has devised seems more a roadmap to ruin than anything else, and a laughable one at that. Among the products the company sees Apple developing by 2013:

A network-enabled “clock radio”
An AppleSound universal music controller
A digital picture frame
A “Genius Bar” that makes house calls just like the Geek Squad.

Huh. So Apple, after reinventing the desktop UI, the digital media player, and the phone, will set its sights on the lowly clock radio and picture frame. Really? If Apple’s product dev team pitched Forrester’s clock radio idea to CEO Steve Jobs, he would probably hurl them one-by-one into rush-hour traffic from the roof of 1 Infinite Loop.