Apple round-up: Blizzard edition

Digging out of the news that piled up while New York was getting socked with a snowstorm

The NYPD, stuck in snow. Credit: Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Here's what we found Monday night when we finally made our way from Boston back to Brooklyn: 6-foot drifts, unplowed streets and a pile of unsorted Apple (AAPL) headlines. The top news:

• A brief report from DigiTimes that Apple has upped its iPhone shipment goal for the quarter that started Sunday from 19 million to 20-21 million, including 5-6 million CDMA phones for the Asian and U.S. markets, spawned a flurry of follow-ups stories. We counted 45 on Techmeme alone.
• My colleague Seth Weintraub's report on Fortune.com that Google (GOOG) Android phones built around a new Broadcom (BRCM) chipset could be sold for as little as $85 in 2011 triggered a debate about whether that spells big trouble for Apple, with Weintraub and A VC's Fred Wilson for the affirmative. Daring Fireball's John Gruber and Asymco's Horace Dediu argue the negative. Apple will do just fine reaping big profits on the high end, they say, it's Nokia's (NOK) non-smartphones that will get squeezed.
• A former employee at Research in Motion (RIMM) has revealed, apparently in a stray comment on a gaming site, that one of the reasons it took the BlackBerry maker so long to respond to Steve Jobs' introduction of the iPhone in 2007 is that they thought he was lying about what the device could do. It wasn't until they cracked an iPhone open and discovered that it was a basically a large battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it that they took the challenge seriously. Electronista has the story.
• After blasting the press last week with a release announcing what it expected to do, Apple was content to leak to All Things Digital's John Paczkowski the news that it actually did sell its 1 millionth Apple TV in the week before Christmas.
• Regular visitors to Apple.com's Investor Relations page will see that the company has set a date for the release of its Q1 2011 earnings: Tuesday Jan. 18. A conference call to discuss the report will begin at 2 p.m. PST. That's 5 p.m. Brooklyn time.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]