Mac

The first time I met Steve Jobs

... he lied to me. Although to be fair, it was more a lie of omission than a barefaced lie

Pardon me if this feels like ancient history. But this is a story I've never put into print (or pixels) before, and I figured if not now, when?

It was December 1982 and a crowd of journalists had gathered in a meeting room at The Pierre, a luxury hotel one block north of MORE

How Apple's business grows

A snapshot -- by revenue stream -- of an extraordinary quarter

Asymco's Horace Dediu is still trying to wrap his head around the earnings report that Apple (AAPL) issued Tuesday, in which the company announced that it had made more money in its June quarter than it did in December, even without a new iPhone.

But one thing, he says, is clear:

"One of the most common themes during the last year was MORE

Another Apple blowout quarter. Once again, the Street blew it

But an amateur -- a Romanian mathematician teaching in Paris -- nailed the numbers

This story never gets old.

An army of Wall Street analysts, backed by the computing power of some of the world's richest banks and brokerage houses, have once again been out-foxed and out-analyzed by rag-tag bunch of bloggers, amateurs and independent investors.

A glance at the chart at right, which lists the 48 analysts we polled in advance of MORE

Apple Q3 2011 earnings preview

Estimates from 48 analysts forecast earnings growth between 50% and 107% year over year

This was a busy week for last-minute revisions from the Wall Street analysts that follow Apple (AAPL). The spreadsheet above shows the final estimates we've collected -- barring still more revisions -- from four dozen amateurs and professionals, along with each analyst's rank, where available, in our earnings smackdowns for Q1 and Q2.

An amateur, Traderhood's Nicolae Mihalache, MORE

How many iPhones did Apple sell last quarter?

The analysts' estimates range from 15 million to 20.25 million. Average: 16.9 million.

No product contributes more to Apple's (AAPL) bottom line than the iPhone.

In the 2nd fiscal quarter that ended in March, when the company sold a record 18.65 million units, the iPhone and related products and services generated $12.3 billion in revenue, almost exactly 50% of Apple's total sales for the quarter -- more than the Mac, iPod and MORE

Whose ox Apple has gored

When you look at the market caps of its competitors, the picture is pretty clear

UBS's Maynard Um posted two interesting charts in a note to clients Monday.

The first compares the growth in Apple's value since 2007 with its chief competitors in the PC and handset businesses.

Apple's (AAPL) market capitalization (calculated by multiplying its share price by the number of shares outstanding) now stands at $327 billion, making it the world's MORE

Apple's Asia-Pacific profits grew 2,991% in the past 5 years

In Japan, its profits grew 1,156% between 2005 and 2010. Europe's were up 1,518%

"Apple's international sales are simply on fire"

So wrote the Motley Fool's Erik Bleeker Monday in a piece assessing Apple's (AAPL) overseas demand.

It is, as he puts it, exploding.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following COO Tim Cook's Q&As with analysts, where he's been highlighting Apple's growth in the Japanese and Asia Pacific MORE

The Final Cut Pro X debacle

One day later, 501 reviews, 229 of them negative

"Since the early 2000s," according to its Wikipedia entry, "Final Cut Pro began to develop a large and expanding user base, mainly video hobbyists and independent filmmakers." By 2008, according to a survey published by the American Cinema Editors Guild, more than one in five members had abandoned Avid's (AVID) Media Composer and were doing their post-production work on Final Cut Pro.

Which MORE

Apple's Back to School promo: No more free iPod touch

Instead, students this year get the usual 10% discount and a $100 software gift card

We always thought of the iPod touch that Apple (AAPL) offered students as part of the company's annual "Back to School" sale as the equivalent of a narcotics dealer's free sample: a gateway drug that left users craving for an iPhone.

To the dismay of much of the class of 2011, Apple has dropped the popular loss MORE

iOS developer survey: 47% are on Android too, only 7% on Mac

Perhaps not surprisingly, because they were all at an Apple conference, 100% prefer iOS

Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster attended Apple's (AAPL) Worldwide Developers Conference last week and spent some time buttonholing attendees for a follow-up survey he was conducting.

He published the results Monday in a note to clients that compared the responses of the 45 developers he spoke to last week to 20 he surveyed at the same event three years MORE