The objective of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android operating system may be similar--providing a rich mobile Internet experience--but the philosophy behind the two are just about as far apart as you can get in the technology realm.

That divide was illustrated Tuesday not just by Google's release of the open-source Android software but perhaps even more starkly by its gleeful horn-tooting that even before the day ended, five Android patches from outside programmers had been accepted.

"It's a small start, but knowing that we accepted our first patch from a contributor external to the Open … Read more

Intel's romance with Apple appears to have gone sour.

Company executives have decided to start including the iPhone as one of their prime examples of smartphones that don't run "the full Internet" because they don't use an Intel chip, according to a report out of the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei from our friends down under at ZDNet Australia. This specious argument--that ARM-based chips aren't man enough to run the Internet--is nothing new from Intel, but the decision to highlight the iPhone as part of that argument is.

Intel has been trying … Read more

The rampant success of the iPhone has forced Apple and its financial watchers to re-evaluate the value of the company.

Saying that Apple's iPhone business "had become too big to ignore," Apple CEO Steve Jobs made a rare appearance on the company's earnings conference call earlier on Tuesday to explain just how much money the iPhone is dumping into Apple's coffers. For the first time, the company used supplemental financial details to give some color on the contribution that the iPhone could be making to Apple's bottom line if iPhone sales were handled like … Read more

Apple's fourth-quarter earnings conference call was made a bit more lively due to its unusual guest star: CEO Steve Jobs.

It's not unprecedented for Jobs to sit in on one of Apple's earnings calls, usually handled by COO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer, but it certainly is very rare. Jobs said he jumped on the call to help explain Apple's decision to shed a little more light on the contribution the iPhone makes to his company's finances, although there's probably more than one reason why he chose Tuesday to make his appearance.

The … Read more

A brief follow-up to my last post on the iPhone replacing the iPod as Apple's main vehicle for innovation. Look at the quarterly sales figures released Tuesday.

Apple sold 6.9 million iPhones in the quarter, well ahead of most estimates. (These guys were just about right.)

To try to get an idea what this means, I looked at last few quarterly earnings calls as reported on iLounge. Here are the iPhones sold each quarter since their introduction:

June 2007: 270,000 (It was only on sale for two days in this quarter.) September 2007: 1.1 million December 2007: … Read more

Updated throughout at 3:15 p.m. PT after Apple's conference call.

Apple's fourth-quarter profit soared past expectations on extremely strong sales of the iPhone, but revenue was a little light, and the company left itself a lot of wiggle room heading into what it called a "challenging" environment.

For the company's fourth fiscal quarter, or the period ended September 27, Apple reported revenue of $7.9 billion, compared with revenue of $6.2 billion in the same quarter last year. Net income was $1.14 billion, or earnings per share of $1.26. Analysts … Read more

It's something that has been talked about for years, and now the author of a new book is trying to explain it: the idea that to many people, Apple is a religion.

In an interview with the creators of the film MacHeads, which itself examines the Apple branding and community phenomena, Buyology author Martin Lindstrom (see video below) talked about just how powerful that brand is.

"Apple is (as we've proven using neuroscience)...a religion," Lindstrom said in the interview. "Not only that--it is a religion based on its communities. Without its core communities, Apple … Read more

Apple's fourth quarter should have survived the economic chaos currently rounding the globe, but what Wall Street will care about Tuesday afternoon is its outlook on the future.

Despite a few more product glitches than usual, it's been business as usual at Apple during the past three months: strong Mac growth and steady iPod sales, with the added bonus of soaring iPhone sales this time around. But the company finds itself in a much different economic environment than last time Apple held an earnings conference call in July.

Will consumers who just watched the value of their retirement … Read more

If Tuesday's news of new, more-powerful, Mac laptops wasn't enough to stoke the fires of the Apple faithful, I've got even more to offer.

Tuesday afternoon, the producers of the forthcoming film, MacHeads, released a new trailer. The film is scheduled for a fall release. No word yet on how it will be distributed.

The film, as noted here in January, will take a close look at what Wired writer Leander Kahney has termed the "cult of Mac."

The new trailer doesn't shed much more light on the contents of the film, but for … Read more