Rogers in Canada to get iPhone in 2008

Not a big surprise, but Ted Rogers, CEO of Rogers Communications, has finally confirmed that the iPhone will come to Canada this year. He was tight-lipped on timing though, and there are still eight months left this year.

I suspect Rogers may launch with a 3G model, as it has a strong HSPA network, and the 3G iPhone may be announced by WWDC. I'm not optimistic that Fido will get the iPhone at all this year however, despite the fact that Fido is a subsidiary of Rogers, and uses the same network.

Apple buys semiconductor company P.A. Semi

Apple has purchased the fabless chip design company P.A. Semi, for a rumoured $278 million. This alone is interesting, but what is doubly interesting is the fact that P.A. Semi designed the dual-core 64-bit PowerPC CPU that some had thought Apple could have used for a new Mac laptop (although Apple had already announced the switch to Intel).

It's not clear what Apple will do with this purchase. Right now in 2008, this 14 Watt 2 GHz dual-core chip seems inappropriate for most of their current products, although it's possible a derivative could be used in products like AppleTV (and theoretically a low power laptop), or other products that have not yet been announced. The benchmarks of this chip are listed below:

At 2 GHz, each core achieves a SPECint2000 score of 1,000 and a SPECfp2000 score of 1,500. Running SPEC benchmarks, each core dissipates around 7 W max; a SPECint/W of 142.8, about four times more power efficient than a Core 2 Duo processor.

Those speeds roughly are equivalent to about a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 and a 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 Extreme for SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000 respectively, for each core of the PA6T-1682M.

Forbes postulates that Apple intends to use in-house chips for the iPhone (and iPod) platform, and I would agree that is a strong possibility, especially since the acquisition was led by Tony Fadell, Senior Vice President of the iPod Division. It would take a new chip design for this purpose, but it's plausible that P.A. Semi already has some such low power designs in progress, also based off the PowerPC architecture. It's of note that the founder of P.A. Semi had his roots in the design of very low power StrongARM microprocessors. Another notable piece of trivia is Apple helped develop the ARM architecture and put an ARM chip in the Apple Newton.

This news comes the day of the Apple earnings call, which will occur after the market closes. So far AAPL is up to $163 in pre-market trading this morning, up from a close yesterday of $160.20.

[Update 2008-04-23]

EETimes says Apple doesn't actually care much about P.A. Semi's chips.

P.A. Semi customers were told the acquiring company was not interested in the startup's products or road map, but is buying the company for its intellectual property and engineering talent.

No more AAPL for me

I divested myself of AAPL on Monday afternoon, at $167.02. It had a great run up in the last few weeks, and closed at $168.16 on Monday. However, with all the various Wall Street analysts increasing their estimates for the quarter recently, I had become less optimistic that Apple will wow investors in their earnings call on Wednesday.

I hope for Apple's sake and the sake of its investors that Apple does blow past earnings estimates and provides better than expected guidance for the coming quarter. If so, AAPL should see a nice increase after hours on Wednesday. However, if they only meet (the new) expectations and provide very conservative guidance, it's quite possible that AAPL will drop in the short term by quite a signficant amount.

In the meantime, I will watch with interest... from the sidelines.

AAPL opened on Tuesday at $167.41, and as of 10:04 am was $163.81.

Apple captures 6.6% of US PC sales

AppleInsider has given us details of a report released by Gartner indicating that Apple has hit 6.6% US market share for PC sales. This places Apple in 4th place, after Dell, HP, and Acer, and puts them ahead of Toshiba. The 6.6% market share represents a significant increase over the 5.2% in the same quarter last year.

What's really remarkable about this is the number of units shipped. Last year they shipped 0.76 million units in Q1. In 2008 Q1 it was up 32.5% to 1.010 million. Even more remarkable is the fact that this quarter's shipments are only slightly less than the 2007 Q4 quarter, when they shipped 1.035 million units. To put it another way, in this traditionally slow quarter, Apple shipped 97.6% as many units in the US as the most recent red hot Christmas holiday quarter.

What we don't know is the worldwide sales numbers. There has been talk of a 2 million Mac Q1, but given the remarkable US numbers released by Gartner, it makes us wonder if Apple can beat even that. Perhaps 2.1-2.2 million? Either way, if the analysts are right then this would represent the first time Apple has shipped 2 million units in the calendar Q1 quarter.

Apple reports its quarterly results on April 23. The (less than inspiring guidance) for the last quarter was revenue of $6.8 billion, with earnings of 94¢ per share. Undoubtedly Apple will beat that, and the Street is predicting earnings of $1.06 per share on revenue of $6.95 billion for the quarter. Expected guidance for calendar Q2 2008 is $1.10 per share on $7.14 billion in revenue.

AAPL closed today at $153.70, up $5.32 (3.59%), and then ended the day up another $1.37 after-hours to $155.07. That's $6.69 over yesterday's close, up 4.5%.

[Update 2008-04-17]

Here is a summary of analysts' earning estimates.

Note that the article talks about Apple's financial Q2, which is the same as calendar Q1.

Best iPhone review ever

Enjoy!

iPhone SDK: Next iPhone will be 3.5G HSDPA

According to ZiPhone's Blog, the latest beta iPhone software development kit makes reference to Infineon's S-GOLD3H PMB 8878. This is a 3.5G HSDPA chip, which maintains backwards compatibility with GSM EDGE and GPRS networks.

Now that we know "what", we just need to know "when".