Today: Apple (AAPL) celebrates record-breaking iPhone sales as BlackBerry agrees to contemplate sale, Microsoft continues its mobile efforts and Pandora tumbles.
The Lead: Apple breaks sales record on iPhone debut weekend as competitors show effects
Apple's draw with consumers was reiterated Monday morning, when the Cupertino technology titan announced that it had sold a record 9 million iPhones on the first weekend of availability for its newest models, the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C. While Apple celebrated its latest big money-making event, companies that compete in certain markets with the consumer-tech giant continued to show the effects of attempting to compete with Apple's ability to sell mobile devices.
Apple announced Monday morning that it sold 9 million iPhones after launching sales of the devices in select countries Friday morning, drawing record-beating lines in some areas. Sales easily topped analyst estimates, which mostly ranged from 5 million (the same amount Apple sold in the debut weekend of its last iPhone) to 8 million, and exhausted the supply of the more expensive model.
"The demand for the new iPhones has been incredible, and while we've sold out of our initial supply of iPhone 5S, stores continue to receive new iPhone shipments regularly," CEO Tim Cook said in Monday's news release, while apparently taking some time off from his new Twitter account.
Apple likely generated billions in revenue in a single weekend, then saw the company with the most smartphone buzz in the pre-iPhone era begin the process of selling itself at a price lower than Apple's weekend revenues. BlackBerry, which made business-friendly smartphones immensely popular before the iPhone was introduced in 2007, committed to sell the company to a Canadian private-equity firm for $9 a share, or about $4.7 billion.
"Yesterday's heroes are tomorrow's losers," Northland Wealth Management fund manager David Cockfield said, summing up BlackBerry's fall to Bloomberg News.
BlackBerry stock briefly rose higher than $9 a share Monday, showing hope that other bids could drive the price higher; shares closed with a 1.1 percent gain to $8.82, after shares were decimated last week, when the Canadian company announced layoffs and poor revenue performance.
While Apple's rise in mobile devices harmed companies already working in that field prior to the iPhone and iPad, it may have done the most damage to the personal computer industry, which has been in a decline for more than a year as consumers do most of their computing on smartphones and tablets. PC software giant Microsoft took a while to catch up to that change, and its first attempts to counter Apple resulted in a write-down of nearly $1 billion, but the Washington tech powerhouse continues to seek its answer to the popular Apple devices.
Microsoft announced its second round of Surface tablets at a Monday event, pricing its new Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 lower than comparable iPads and playing up the devices' ability to perform the same tasks as a PC -- avoiding the iPad's key selling point as a media machine.
"We have to get people to think of it as a little different (from) an iPad," Brian Hall, general manager of sales and marketing for Surface, told the Associated Press. "iPads are great, but these are a different device. ... We're building a product for a different set of people."
Investors pushed Microsoft's stock price down 0.2 percent to $32.74 on the day, and analysts were unimpressed.
"I don't see much incentive for people to buy these devices. Yes, they are cheaper than the iPads, but is that enough reason?" J. Gold Associates technology analyst Jack Gold told Reuters, later adding, "I think they needed to do something that was innovative beyond the first generation, and I don't see that in these devices."
iPhone sales were not the only metric Apple played up in Monday's announcement, after the company stayed in the news for a solid week leading up to its launch. The company said that 200 million users had updated the operating system on Apple devices to iOS 7 less than a week after the company made the updated platform available, and that 11 million of them had checked out the streaming-music offering included with the release, iTunes Radio.
What is good for iTunes Radio could be read as damaging to Oakland streaming-music pioneer Pandora, and investors laid a beating on the company's stock after it had soared for most of 2013. Pandora stock declined $2.73, or 10.1 percent, to $24.26 Monday, despite assurances from company executives that they were prepared for the iTunes Radio launch and will outlast it, as they have other attempts to horn in on the market.
"We've been at it longer, we're more committed to solving it well, and we're far from done," Pandora Chief Technology Officer Tom Conrad told The Mercury News last week.
While its competition floundered on Wall Street, Apple moved as high as $496.91 before closing with a 5 percent gain at $490.64, as analysts sang the company's praises and boosted their price targets.
SV150 market report: Wall Street struggles; Netflix, Yelp and Google descend
Silicon Valley technology stocks not named Apple had a tough day Monday, but the gains from the most valuable company in the world helped push the SV150 to an overall gain on the day. It wasn't enough to help the major national indexes, though, as all three declined on a rough Monday for Wall Street.
Netflix (NFLX) dropped 3.8 percent to $302.04 after "House of Cards" came up short in its bid to be the first drama not shown on network or cable television to take home the Emmy for best drama. The Los Gatos video-on-demand service fell from record heights established last week, and introduced a new offering that allows users of San Francisco microblogging service Twitter to avoid spoilers about their favorite television programs. San Francisco online-reviews website Yelp declined 6 percent to $65.80 as New York authorities cracked down on companies that provide fake reviews, and San Mateo solar installer SolarCity fell 3.9 percent to $35.77 after announcing a deal with fellow green-energy provider Viridian. Google (GOOG) fell 1.8 percent to $886.50 while continuing to purchase vast amounts of land in Silicon Valley, and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) dropped 2 cents to $21.20 on the day it was removed from the Dow Jones industrial average.
Among the handful of companies joining Apple in gains was Extreme Networks, which gained 1.8 percent to $5.09 and has been on a roll since a major acquisition earlier this month, and Maxim Integrated, which gained 1.2 percent to $30.04 after receiving an upgrade from Goldman Sachs.
Up: Apple, Zynga, Applied Materials, NetApp
Down: Pandora, Yelp, SolarCity, Netflix, VMware, SunPower (SPWRA), Juniper, Yahoo (YHOO), Gilead, Google, LinkedIn, Symantec, EA, Tesla, AMD, Nvidia, Adobe (ADBE), Cisco
The SV150 index of Silicon Valley's largest tech companies: Up 3.43, or 0.26 percent, to 1,344.25
The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Down 9.44, or 0.25 percent, to 3,765.29
The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Down 49.71, or 0.32 percent, to 15,401.38
And the widely watched Standard & Poor's 500 index: Down 8.07, or 0.47 percent, to 1,701.84
Check in weekday afternoons for the 60-Second Business Break, a summary of news from Mercury News staff writers, The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and other wire services. Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/jowens510.