Apple Corporate

The U.S. Department of Justice may file an antitrust lawsuit against Apple for alleged e-book price fixing as early as tomorrow, according to Reuters.

Apple had reportedly been in talks with federal regulators but had failed to come to an agreement to settle their concerns. Along with Apple, five book publishers are also reportedly under investigation for alleged price fixing: HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster. (CBS owns Simon & Schuster and CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News.)

Apple representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Justice Department … Read more

Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to make another rare public speaking appearance at a technology conference next month.

All Things Digital today said that Cook will be a speaker at the outlet's D10 conference taking place at the end of May. Cook's predecessor, late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, attended the conference in several previous years.

The appearance will be Cook's second at a conference in recent months. In mid-February, Cook appeared at the Goldman Sachs' annual Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco to discuss everything from worker safety to the company's plans for its pile … Read more

If you're looking for the technology industry's most popular company, look no further than Mountain View, Calif.

ABC News and the Washington Post recently joined forces with Langer Research Associates to poll more than 1,000 Americans between March 28 and April 1 on their attitudes toward some of the tech world's most successful companies. The researchers found that a whopping 82 percent of respondents have a "favorable" opinion of Google, making it the most popular tech company. Just 9 percent of respondents expressed an "unfavorable" opinion toward the search giant, while 10 … Read more

Apple's market capitalization crossed the $600 billion mark earlier today, setting a record for the company and nearing that of one of its biggest rivals.

Shares of the company's stock reached $644 in intraday trading. Per Dow Jones, the stock needs to close above $643.52 to reach the magic $600 billion number.

Market capitalization is defined as the value of shares times the number of shares outstanding. Apple passed previous market cap champ Exxon on that metric last year, and is now nearing the $619 billion market cap record set by rival Microsoft on December 30, 1999. … Read more

Well, this is different: Apple's stock, which has been soaring over the last several years, has been downgraded from Buy to Neutral by BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk.

Piecyk has now pitted himself against countless analysts who believe Apple's shares will continue to soar. And although he thinks Apple will post a strong fiscal second quarter, he thinks the company is facing three major issues that could stunt its growth: changes afoot in the post-paid wireless industry, the possibility of an iPhone price cut, and the prospect of Apple not launching a "revolutionary product into the market&… Read more

Rob Schmitz, the public radio journalist who cried foul on Apple commentator Mike Daisey's statements related to Foxconn working conditions, is now reporting from the factory floor.

Schmitz, who has been a longtime correspondent for American Public Media's Marketplace, is only the second Western journalist to be granted access to Foxconn facilities, and today offered his first report on what he observed at the company's factory in Shenzhen, China. Not surprisingly, his first takeaway was comprehending the vast number of people working on Apple's iPad.

"In this factory, on the iPad assembly line, what first … Read more

Rob Schmitz, the public radio journalist who exposed Apple commentator Mike Daisey's fabrications regarding working conditions at a Chinese electronics factory, has become only the second Western journalist to be granted access to Foxconn's factory floor.

The reports from the longtime China correspondent for American Public Media's Marketplace are scheduled to begin airing tomorrow on public radio stations. Schmitz has also written about his visit on his reporter's notebook blog, notes Fortune.

In his one-man play, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," Daisey claimed to have witnessed dangerous working conditions suffered by … Read more

Apple has cultivated a myth about security on the Mac platform. The myth goes like this: Apple users don't need antivirus software. We're more secure than anything out there. Security worries are overblown.

In reality, Apple practiced security by obscurity with the Mac.

Those days may be ending in a hurry. Apple's relative silence about malware is going to have to end as the company finds itself managing a large ecosystem, noted ZDNet's Ed Bott. Delivering massive security updates during product launches and software rollouts just isn't going to cut it.

The Flashback virus has … Read more

If you're keeping score -- and who doesn't these days? -- it now costs more to buy a share of Apple than to purchase a share of Google.

To be sure, this is more about bragging rights than anything else as the market capitalization is the truer indicator of value, and on that score Apple long ago surpassed Google's market cap. In fact, Apple is actually worth three times as much as Google.

Apple, however, still has a long way to go before its per-share price can compare with Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, which is currently … Read more