High Bar Knocks Down Apple Shares

Apple(AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs bowed to the company's growing base of independent developers by announcing Monday that Apple would allow them to develop applications for its forthcoming iPhone.

That news, however, wasn't enough for investors, who pushed the stock lower on the lack of a "wow" announcement.

Shares of Apple closed Monday at $120.19, off $4.30, or 3.5%.

Opening up iPhone application development marked the finale of Jobs' keynote speech, which kicked off Apple's weeklong annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Prior to now, Jobs had given developers little hope that they would have access to the iPhone.

His announcement reflects the growing influence of developers whose applications are seen as an important way to attract new Mac users -- and iPhone users -- and continue expanding Apple's share of the market for personal computers and mobile devices.

As expected, Jobs devoted most of his speech to new features available with Apple's latest Mac operating system, Leopard. Among Leopard's 300 new features, Jobs demonstrated a new desktop search tool, automatic data backup and recovery features and the new iChat video conferencing application.

Once Jobs concluded his review of 10 new features, he stopped and said, as he regularly does ahead of new product announcements: "One more thing." At that point, he announced that Apple's Safari Web browser would be available for PC running Microsoft's(MSFT) Windows. Safari holds roughly 5% share of the Internet searches, next to Firefox and Internet Explorer. It is available now for Microsoft's Vista operating system and XP as well.