Apple

Apple erased any assumptions on Wednesday that a slowdown in U.S. consumer spending is negatively affecting its bottom line.

The company reported revenue of $7.5 billion and net income of $1.1 billion for its second fiscal quarter (PDF), which ended March 29. The net income translates to earnings per share of $1.16, and both the revenue and earnings per share blew away Wall Street expectations of $6.9 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $1.07.

As has been the case the last several quarters, the Mac led the charge for Apple. Mac shipments … Read more

Is Apple really that much of a chip hopper?

If Apple follows through and uses a chip designed by its latest acquisition, PA Semi, in a future product, the company will have made major bets on Power, x86, ARM, and Power again in just this decade. What, no love for SPARC or MIPS?

A PA Semi representative on Wednesday confirmed last night's news that Apple has paid $278 million for the low-power chip designer. Led by prominent chip designer Don Dobberpuhl, the two-and-a-half-year-old company makes chips for embedded devices based on IBM's Power instruction set.

So what might … Read more

Come back to CNET News.com at 2 p.m. PDT (although we sincerely hope you never leave) for a live blog of Apple's second-quarter earnings conference call.

The key things to look out for are Mac shipments, iPhone momentum, and Apple's forecast for the next quarter, which tends to dictate how the investment community responds to the earnings reports. Reporters are not allowed to ask questions during the calls, only the financial analysts are granted that privilege, which usually means you have to sit through a couple of minutes of "great quarter, guys."

The numbers … Read more

Recession fears, rampant iPhone unlocking, and a pessimistic outlook dinged Apple at the beginning of this year, but surging Mac shipments appeared to have the company in good shape as it closed out the quarter.

Apple is set to announce its financial results for its second fiscal quarter on Wednesday after the close of the stock market. The company has not appeared overly bullish on this particular quarter, issuing guidance well below its usual conservative outlook in January and admitting at its shareholder meeting in March that the industry is going through "concerning times" right now amid a … Read more

Apple has reportedly made a rare acquisition, snapping up low-power chip company PA Semi one day before reporting its quarterly earnings.

Forbes reported late Tuesday that Apple has agreed to purchase the company for a middling $278 million, quoting Apple spokesman Steve Dowling as confirming the deal. PA Semi made its debut a few years back designing low-power chips based on Apple's old friend, the Power architecture.

It's not clear what Apple might have in mind for PA Semi. I'd doubt Apple plans to get into the chip design game anytime soon, although having low-power chip experts … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Designing a user interface for a mobile computer isn't hard; all you have to do is think like a person.

Sounds simple, but it's taken a long time for that realization to set in, said Stu Card, manager of the user interface group at the famed Palo Alto Research Center. Card joined fellow researcher Ted Selker of MIT's Media Lab at Sofcon 2008 to discuss human interfaces for mobile computers, and just how differently engineers have to treat these devices than their older PC brothers.

PCs weren't necessarily designed for end users in … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--The technologists and businesspeople working to create the next generation of mobile computers know they're going to have to play in the cloud.

About 45 miles down the road from the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where cloud computing is enabling an industry, attendees at Sofcon 2008 on Tuesday morning are thinking about how to unlock all the data stored inside corporations and make it accessible by mobile computers through the cloud. Timothy Chou, author and a former executive at Oracle, thinks that as businesses adopt mobile computers, they'll dramatically expand the need … Read more

Several smartphone makers are finding themselves short of product this spring, not just Apple.

A few weeks ago, Apple's retail stores were extremely low on iPhones, which at the time was attributed to a clearing of the channel before the next revision to the product brought 3G speed. But Apple's not the only company dealing with lean inventories, according to a research note from Morgan Keegan spotted by Electronista.

Research In Motion and Palm are also short on certain smartphone models, with RIM's carriers running low on BlackBerry Pearls and Palm's Treo 755p hard to find. … Read more

A report out of Italy Monday suggests that Apple is planning to revamp its business model with the launch of the iPhone in that country.

It's always tough to correctly interpret translations, but check out the report from La Repubblica and read it for yourself. In short, the report claims that Apple is getting ready to launch a 3G iPhone in Italy with Telecom Italy, and that the carrier will not have to pay Apple a share of the data revenue earned from iPhone users, nor will it have an ongoing exclusive. As a result, the iPhone will be … Read more