iPhone

Is 4 million Verizon iPhone sales bad news for Apple?

Verizon activated 3.2 million iPhones in the same quarter last year.

FORTUNE --  Verizon (VZ) reported Thursday morning that it activated 7.2 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2013, 4 million of them iPhones.

There are several perfectly legitimate ways to interpret what those numbers mean for Apple (AAPL).

Good for Apple: 4 million iPhones is 25% better than the 3.2 million Verizon activated in the same quarter last year.
Good for Apple: 55.5% MORE

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by Kevin Kelleher, contributor

FORTUNE -- This is how quickly fortunes change in the smartphone industry. In 2006, Nokia (NOK) still controlled more than half of the share of the smartphone market. The iPhone wouldn't appear until the summer of 2007. And no one was making Android phones. Android Inc., bought by Google (GOOG) in 2005, wouldn't emerge MORE

Chinese scammers rip off the Apple policies China panned

Swapping fake iPhone parts for real ones under the return rules Chinese TV laid into

FORTUNE -- Talk about an ironic twist. Even as Apple (AAPL) was being lambasted daily in Chinese state-run media for what was being portrayed as unfair iPhone return policies, the company was investigating a ring of Chinese scammers taking advantage of those same policies to rip the company off.

According to a report Monday in The Register, five MORE

Chart of the day: The rise and fall of Apple's iPod

The picture of an Apple device being disrupted by Apple itself.

FORTUNE -- It's easy to forget that only six years ago the iPod was Apple's (AAPL) biggest money maker, generating (in Q1 2007) more than 48% of the company's revenue. Now the iPod is almost an afterthought in quarterly reports dominated by the iPhone, iPad and Mac -- second-to-last among Apple's six revenue streams, below iTunes and above Accessories.

The last MORE

T-Mobile: First day for Apple's iPhone was 'gangbusters'

With trade-ins, an ad-blitz, "un-carrier" pricing and lines outside nearly 3,000 stores

FORTUNE -- No one knows how long it will last, but the pent-up demand at America's fourth largest carrier was palpable Friday morning as lines formed outside T-Mobile USA stores for the first time in memory.

The lines weren't overwhelming, and they dissipated before the afternoon, but it says something about the draw of Apple's (AAPL) iPhone that customers will MORE

Morgan Stanley adjusts its Apple numbers - up and down

Raises iPad estimate 11%, lowers iPhone 11%. Revenue and EPS are both dialed back.

FORTUNE -- Like many Wall Street analysts who follow Apple (AAPL), Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty likes to issue estimates for the current quarter the day after the company reports the previous quarter's results -- and then stick with those numbers for the next three months.

But on Thursday -- two weeks before the company is scheduled to report MORE

How, exactly, do Apple's iPhone sales 'disappoint'?

A Reuters headline has some Apple watchers scratching their heads.

FORTUNE -- A Taipei-datelined Reuters story getting widely picked up Wednesday uses "disappointing" twice in six paragraphs to describe sales of Apple's (AAPL) iPhone.

"Disappointing demand" for the iPhone between January and March is blamed for the 19% drop in the first-quarter revenue of Hon Hai, which assembles iPhones in its Foxconn factories.
"Disappointing holiday sales" in the previous quarter are said to have "reinforced MORE

How many iPhones did Apple sell last quarter?

The forecasts range from 32.5 million to 42.5 million. Median estimate: 37 million.

FORTUNE -- iPhone sales were the big surprise this time last year.

Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) had just turned in disappointing activation numbers and the talking heads on CNBC were predicting that Apple (AAPL) would totally miss its revenue and earnings targets -- forgetting, apparently, that most iPhone sales take place overseas.

When Apple reported last April that it MORE

Chart of the day: The rise and fall of Android in the U.S.

The arc of grey bars tells the story of Android in the second largest smartphone market

FORTUNE -- According to the chart above, drawn from comScore data and posted Friday by Asymco's Horace Dediu, sales of Google (GOOG) Android smartphones in the U.S. peaked in December 2011.

Sales of Apple (AAPL) iPhones, by contrast, continue to grow in the U.S. Dediu attributes that to broader distribution (three of the four major U.S. MORE