q1

Any notions that Apple's iPhone 4S was a lame duck were erased with Apple's quarterly earnings.

Apple reported revenue of $46.33 billion and profits of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per share, for the quarter ended December 31, 2011. That was up from the $26.74 billion, or $6.43 per share, the company saw at the same time last year.

"We're thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads, and Macs," Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, said in a statement. "Apple's momentum is incredibly strong, and we … Read more

Apple reports its first-quarter earnings tomorrow, and Wall Street's expecting some record-breaking numbers all around.

Analysts polled by FactSet predict the company will bring in earnings of $10.04 per share and revenue of $38.92 billion. As usual, that's well above the $9.30 a share on $37 billion Apple forecasted at the end of its last quarter.

There will be a lot to chew on with tomorrow's numbers, which should come in shortly after the close of trading. But the big one to look at is how many iPhones the company sold.

This is the … Read more

Intel's market-moving statement today that it expects a fourth-quarter revenue shortfall of roughly $1 billion has crystallized the impact of the hard disk drive shortage. So how bad is it?

A report last week from IHS-iSuppli said it's pretty bad--a preview of what Intel said today. That is, the flooding in Thailand will hit PC shipments in the first quarter. iSuppli says the shortfall will be about 3.8 million PCs.

And it will knock down PC numbers for the whole year. Global PC shipments for the whole of 2012 are now expected to expand by only 6.… Read more

PC shipments will take a hit in the first quarter next year to the tune of about 4 million units as a result of the continuing hard-disk drive shortage, IHS-iSuppli said today.

Flooding in Thailand has wreaked havoc on hard-disk drive (HDD) supply, as manufacturers try to recover from inundated component plants. This will result in a shortfall of 3.8 million PC shipments in the first quarter of 2012, according to IHS-iSuppli.

Worldwide PC shipments in the first quarter of 2012 will amount to 84.2 million units, compared with the earlier forecast of 88 million, the market researcher … Read more

I recently dropped by EarsNova's spacious new high-end audio store, which has the best-looking showrooms I've seen in a long while. The vibe was relaxed, and the demo rooms' sound was pretty special, but it was the little Magico Q1 speaker that bowled me over.

Were my eyes deceiving me? How could this big sound come from such a small speaker? The sheer physicality and beauty of the sound required some recalibration of my senses to take it all in. Most bona fide high-end speakers are big, imposing things that dominate a room. They're so huge that … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices lost a considerable share of the chip market to Intel in the first quarter, as the latter rebounded easily from a chipset glitch, according to a report today from IHS iSuppli.

AMD accounted for 10.1 percent of global microprocessor revenue in the first quarter of this year, falling from the 11.8 percent share during from the same period last year and down from 10.9 percent in the fourth quarter, according to the report.

AMD's loss was pretty much Intel's gain. Intel during the first three months of this year claimed 82.6 … Read more

Shipments of nonbranded tablets surged in the first quarter, making the so-called "whitebox" tablet segment the second biggest next to Apple's iPad, according to a market research firm.

Local or nonbranded tablet vendors are the fastest growing segment of the worldwide market, according to a report from DisplaySearch released today. Whitebox vendors increased shipments from 567,000 units in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 1.9 million units (see graph below) in the first quarter of this year, representing a 235 percent quarter-to-quarter growth rate, DisplaySearch said.

Largely unnoticed to date, the jump in whitebox shipments … Read more

Magico, based in Berkeley, Calif., has established itself as a major American high-end speaker manufacturer in just a few years. The company builds state-of-the-art speakers with truly innovative technology. I've listened to a lot of large and not-so-large Magico speakers over the years, and was never less than astonished by their sound. The company is just now introducing its smallest speaker ever, the Q1 ($24,950 per pair). The Q1's cabinet is an extensively braced-aluminum-and-copper design.

It's a small monitor speaker, but it's sold with an integrated stand. Mounted on the stand, the Q1 measures 44 … Read more

Motorola Mobility beat analyst estimates, saying it shipped over 250,000 tablets since the Xoom went on sale in February, as the company reported better-than-expected results today.

The Libertyville, Ill., company reported a first-quarter net loss of $81 million, or 27 cents a share, compared with a net loss of $212 million, or 72 cents a share, during the same period last year. Revenue grew 22 percent to $3.03 billion.

The company reported an adjusted net income loss of 8 cents a share. The analysts' consensus was for a loss of 11 cents a share on revenue of $2.… Read more