Asymco

Asymco: Google makes only $1.70 a year per Android device

Apple, by contrast, generated more than $575 for every iOS device it sold last year

"In terms of returns, Android is sustainable," writes Asymco's Horace Dediu at the end of a long analytical piece posted Monday. "However, in relative terms the value created leaves much to be desired."

That's quite an understatement, especially when you consider how much Apple (AAPL) makes on its mobile devices. According to Dediu, Apple generated $576.30 per MORE

The S&P 500 with and without Apple: Round 2

The picture is even more striking than it was a month ago

In February, Jonathan Golub at UBS started a new fashion on the Street by publishing two versions of his regular quarterly forecast: one for the S&P 500, and another for what he called the "S&P 500 ex-Apple."

Strategists at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Wells Fargo soon followed suit.

In Golub's February calculation, the S&P 500's Q1 2012 earnings were on MORE

Asymco: Can the iPad sustain 150% yearly growth?

There is a precedent: iPhone sales have doubled, on average, every year since 2007

The chief difference between the independent analysts who follow Apple (AAPL) and their counterparts on Wall Street is that the independents put a premium on being right.

The professionals, with all due respect, seem to care more about not over-promising or straying too far from the consensus. (See here, here and here, for example.)

So investors who want informed MORE

Did Apple's cash finally burn a hole in its pocket?

We'll find out Monday, one half hour before the market opens

Tim Cook has scheduled a conference call for 9 a.m. EDT Monday to answer the question Wall Street has been asking -- repeatedly, and with increasing insistence -- for years: What does the company plan to do with its enormous stockpile of cash and marketable securities, worth just under $100 billion as of the last quarterly report.

Mr. Market will be MORE

Headed for Los Angeles

If you're in L.A. Thursday or Friday, join us at the Apple Investors Summit

We'll be speaking, along with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, Apple (AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak, Fortune's Adam Lashinsky, Asymco's Horace Dediu, Bullish Cross's Andy Zaky, Posts at Eventide's Robert Paul Leitau, AAPLPain's Travis Lewis, The Street's Jason Schwarz and many more.

To register, click here.

U.S. smartphones: Inching toward 1 million per week

Unless something changes fast, they're all going to be Androids and iPhones

ComScore issued its January snapshot of the U.S. mobile phone market Tuesday -- with accompanying pie chart here -- but if you want to understand what the numbers mean you should check out Horace Dediu's Wednesday morning report on Asymco.com.

Dediu seems to be the only analyst who tracks these monthly reports over time. Graphing two years of comScore data MORE

Apple as the new GM or IBM

Is it a flash in the pan or one of those rare companies that defines an era?

Investors, analysts and business historians have been struggling in the weeks since Apple's (AAPL) most recent earnings report to make sense of this corporate oddity: a mega-cap company ($487.1 billion) that grows like a start-up (first quarter earnings up 115.7%).

Since  November, when it pulled decisively away from Exxon Mobil (XOM), Apple has been the MORE

Who first called Apple at $500?

Technically, it was Hudson Square's Daniel Ernst. But we have a few caveats.

Eyebrows were raised in October 2010 when Daniel Ernst hiked his 12-month Apple (AAPL) price target from $300 a share to $500. But perhaps drawing attention to himself was the point. The senior analyst at Hudson Square Research is now a regular contributor on CNBC and his current price target -- $700 -- is once again the Street's MORE

63% of iPhones were activated outside the U.S. last quarter

And that percentage is likely to increase sharply now that China has the iPhone 4S

The chart at right from Horace Dediu's Asymco blog shows the U.S. share of iPhone activations growing last quarter due, he speculates, to the U.S. launch of the iPhone 4S and the addition of a third domestic carrier, Sprint (S).

But the long-term trend is clear. The U.S. is becoming a progressively less important market for sales of Apple's MORE

Video: Grading the Apple analysts on a scale of A to F

Two ways of seeing how well (or badly) the pros and amateurs predict Apple's earnings

We've been trying for several years to find the best way to show how much better the so-called amateur analysts (some of whom have since gone pro) are at estimating Apple's (AAPL) quarterly revenue and earnings than the Wall Street professionals who do it for the big banks and brokerage firms.

Now Asymco's Horace Dediu, who is MORE