Apple M&A met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk last spring, to partner in battery ‘Gigafactory’?

Those ongoing analyst predictions that Apple would buy Tesla may have been based on some sort of reality.  According the the SF Chronicle, Adrian Perica, Apple’s head of mergers and acquisitions, met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk last spring.

A source tells The Chronicle that Perica met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Cupertino last spring around the same time analysts suggested Apple acquire the electric car giant…

Six months before Ahmad’s letter, Musk met with Perica and probably Cook at Apple headquarters, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect business relationships. While a megadeal has yet to emerge (for all of its cash, Apple still plays hardball on valuation), such a high-level meeting between the two Silicon Valley giants involving their top dealmakers suggests Apple was very much interested in buying the electric car pioneer.

But it is unlikely that Apple wanted to buy the car company and even more unlikely that Musk would sell it. In response to the acquisition rumors at the time, he tweeted the following:

Forgot to say one thing at Tesla annual shareholders meeting: just as my money was the first in, it will be the last out.—
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 05, 2013

But it’s highly likely that Apple would want to buy into one of Tesla’s major upcoming projects.

Tesla is set to announce a US battery ‘Gigafactory’ in the coming days that will more than double world-wide lithium-ion battery production. Apple obviously has a huge interest here, as it uses the batteries in all of its products. Musk has announced that there will be several high-profile partners in the green US plant, likely including Panasonic and possibly Solar City. Apple has been investing in big green US factories recently, including its Mesa AZ Sapphire venture.

There is some synergy between the companies. Tesla has been hiring high-level engineers from Apple at a pretty impressive clip, and Apple’s Cupertino parking lot sometimes looks like a Tesla showroom:

Adrian Perica, a former Goldman Sachs banker, joined Apple several years ago to head up the M&A department. Before that, Steve Jobs was the head of M&A and he’d rarely make deals. For all of Apple’s money, it still makes very few deals, especially compared to its Silicon Valley neighbors like Google and Yahoo.

TSLA’s stock price has been on a tear since its release of the Model S, with shares rocketing from $30 to $200; its market cap is currently near $25B.

- 9to5mac.com

The spaceship is on the way: aerial photo shows demolition work on Apple’s Campus 2 site

Apple’s new ‘spaceship’ headquarters has been a long time in the coming, with Steve Jobs presenting the plans to the Cupertino city council back in 2011, but work has finally begun. KCBS eye-in-the-sky reporter Ron Cervi took the above Instagram photo, showing that demolition work on the site is now underway.

While we heard last month that the demolition phase was starting, this is the first visible evidence we’ve seen. Apple also recently constructed a full-size mockup of one small section of the building in order to test construction methods and enable the company to see how the concrete elements would look in real life … 

Apple received the full set of building permits for the campus in late November after the go-ahead vote a month earlier.

We’ve previously seen a detailed scale model, project video and series of renders showing what Apple’s new headquarters will look like once construction is completed in 2015 or (more likely) 2016.

Via Fortune

- 9to5mac.com

Adobe (ADBE) stock rockets after announcing on-target earnings and strong subscription growth

Adobe stock climbed 10 percent to just under $60 in opening trading after announcing Q4 earnings in line with expectations, and strong growth in subscriptions as the company transitions away from one-time purchase licences.

While year-on-year numbers were poor, revenue down almost 10 percent and earnings almost halved, Adobe has been at pains to point out this was expected as it shifted to subscription-based sales.

As Adobe customers migrate from a legacy Creative Suite perpetual licensing model to new Creative Cloud subscriptions, revenue is recognized over time as opposed to at the time of purchase.

See below for a cool infographic of Adobe by the numbers … 

While Adobe and Apple have had occasional disagreements – most notably over Flash, with Steve Jobs refusing to allow it on iPhones and iPads – Apple customers are a hugely important market for Adobe’s creative products, with Macs pretty much the default choice for graphics professionals, photographers and videographers.

Adobe recently introduced a $9.99/month deal for Photoshop, Lightroom and Behance Pro (with 20GB storage thrown in too), initially set to expire last week but now extended until the end of the year.

Written by: Ben Lovejoy @benlovejoy December 13, 2013/7:30 am - 9to5mac.com

BlackBerry implosion generating even bigger enterprise gains for iPad, says analyst

Concerns about the future viability of Blackberry – once the default choice of mobile device for the enterprise market – have further boosted iPad penetration in businesses, according to an analyst quoted by AllThingsD.

Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair theorizes that BlackBerry’s ill-starred attempt to sell itself inflamed concerns about the future viability of the company’s platform and gave corporations good reason to migrate their employees to other devices. That opened up a significant opportunity for Apple — particularly since Android continues to struggle for gains in enterprise [...]

Said Blair, “Our recent work points to tremendous momentum for iPad in the enterprise over the last few months and we believe that this may be one of the most important trends for Apple as we move into the New Year.”

Steve Jobs said shortly after the launch of the iPad that Apple didn’t need to market the device to businesses as “it’s being grabbed out of our hands, anyways” … 

While Jobs may have considered enterprise-specific marketing unnecessary, Apple subsequently made the business market a specific target, intensifying its marketing with the launch of iOS 7.

Apple already boasts that 94 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are already “testing or deploying” iPads, with independent sources confirming the popularity of the tablet in large and small businesses alike.

Blair believes that the new iPad Air and Retina iPad Mini models, together with the decision to make the iWork software suite free, makes the product all the more compelling. In October, Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore said that he expected the 64-bit A7 chip would help drive enterprise sales (though it should be noted he also expected Touch ID to make it into the new iPads).

Written by: Ben Lovejoy @benlovejoy December 3, 2013/5:42 am - 9to5mac.com