Credit: Priceonomics

Priceonomics, which keeps track of the resale value of items like cars, bikes and gadgets, published a report Wednesday that shows how the value of iPhones, Android devices and BlackBerrys hold up over time. Short answer: iPhones, even years-old models, retain their value the longest, which means iPhone owners can recoup the most money when they go to resell their phones.

Here’s the method they  used:

We measure depreciation by comparing a phone’s current used price to its new price (without a contract) the day it was released. We examined all iPhone models and the 70 most popular Androids and 30 most popular BlackBerry models. We split phones into five different cohorts (newly released, 1, 2, 3, and 4 year-old phones). We then calculated which phones had the best resale by cohort, as well as which platforms in aggregate tended to retain their value the most.

The highest quality phones should have the best resale values over time and crappier phones should depreciate the fastest. The evidence is clear – the winner is the iPhone.

After crunching the data they came up with a series of charts, like one that shows that after owning a smartphone for 18 months, iPhone owners can resell theirs for 53 percent of the original price, Android owners for 42 percent and BlackBerry owners for 41 percent of the original price.

That part won’t be news to people who make a habit of reselling their old iPhone before or right after buying a new one a new one. There are sites like Gazelle.com, eBay and NextWorth.com that regularly buy used iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android phones in order to resell them. The iPhone is always the easiest to resell and will go for a decently high price if you time it right.

But all is not lost for penny-pinching Android owners. One caveat to the data that Priceonomics found is that less expensive Android phones sold by prepaid operators do hold their value much better than their pricier Google-powered brethren, probably because those phones are highly subsidized by the operators. Specifically, the Motorola Triumph, HTC Wildfire and Samsung Exhibit 4G on average keep up to 86 percent of the original value.

Be sure to check out the original post for more interesting data.

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The groups say they will deliver the petitions in person in Washington, D.C., New York City, San Fransisco, London, Sydney and Bangalore and will carry signs and leaflets.

The SumOfUs petition has more than 56,000 electronic signatures so far. According to the grassroots group, more than 35,000 of those signatures belong to people who say they are current Apple customers — 20,000 of them are said to be iPhone owners. The number includes Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, SumOfUs’ executive director, who says she love her iPhone but doesn’t “love having to support sweatshops.”

In the press release she adds:

“Apple’s attention to detail is famous, and the only way they could fail to be aware of dozens of worker deaths, of child labor, of exposure to neurotoxins is through willful ignorance. That’s why our members are asking Apple to clean up its supply chains in time to make the iPhone 5 its first ethically produced product.”

Apple has said it cares about workers and says it’s doing all it can to improve conditions at factories like Foxconn’s. CEO Tim Cook wrote in an internal email to employees earlier this month, “We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us.”

But even if that is true, it doesn’t change the fact that some iPhone owners and other concerned citizens aren’t satisfied with the current status of those factories, how workers are treated and paid, and will do what they can to continue to make this an issue for Apple.

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• Apple has almost $100 billion in cash now.
• Cook told investors and reporters late last year he wasn’t “religious” about holding cash, a subtle but important difference in the attitude Steve Jobs has long had about Apple’s cash holdings.
• CFO Peter Oppenheimer shared several weeks ago that the company is “actively discussing” what to do with all that money.
• People who could be in a position to know are starting to talk openly about it.

A UBS analyst says Apple has been soliciting opinions from investors on what to do with the money. We all know what investors want Apple to do:  give it back to shareholders.

And on Monday, Fortune editor Adam Lashinsky, author of the just-released (and excellent) Inside Apple, writes that we should expect to hear about AAPL owners getting a dividend “sooner rather than later.” As someone who’s demonstrated he knows a thing or two about what goes on inside 1 Infinite Loop, this is yet another good indication Apple is thinking differently about its money these days. As Lashinsky points out, what else will they do with it?:

[W]hat’s becoming increasingly clear is that Apple has a success problem on its hands: It has run out of ways to responsibly spend its profits. It has never done what any other big company would view as a major acquisition. Silicon Valley investment bankers desperately would like to see Apple acquire Twitter, for example. But this would be so contrary to the Apple acquisition mindset that it’s hard to imagine.

Apple’s annual shareholder meeting is coming up on February 23. These kinds of meetings can be somewhat of a snooze. Perhaps this year edition will have a few fireworks.

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Nguyen goes into a lot of detail, and it’s a must-read for anyone thinking about commissioning an iOS (or really any mobile OS) application. Here’s one passage in particular that I know will resonate with a lot of freelance devs:

Converting an iPhone app to iPhone/iPad universal app: This is the worst ‘additional feature’ found in iPhone development contracts. Because an iPad app is not a frikin’ additional feature. The iPad app is always more complex than iPhone app, and most of the time requires entirely different interface and interaction mechanism. It’s like making an electric bicycle and then convert[ing] it to a fuel-powered motorcycle! They are very similar at what they do, but under the hood, the difference is immense. [Emphasis in the original]

A lot of companies may be interested in what an app can do for their business, but without a good sense of what kind of resources need to be invested in order to create the app in the first place, there is bound to be ample frustration on all sides. Nguyen’s no-nonsense primer is a good way to help avoid some of that frustration.

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So the question is, What plans does Apple have for the cloud? Given recent history one can easily assume that the company would build more cloud apps that enhance existing services, like iTunes Match and Photostream. But those are small potatoes. The real opportunity for Apple is to offer a series of network services for its developers and millions of iPhone and iPad and Mac owners: network services such as storage, location data, voice command and control, notifications, and messaging.

• Storage. ICloud is already a place to access your photos, songs and contacts remotely from any iOS device or OS X Lion machine. But what about making your desktop files and apps available everywhere too? Take the way Apple is going with its MacBook Air, a huge hit for the company. A logical next step to make even thinner and lighter machines with very little room for storage is to make a cloud-centric MacBook. Imagine opening up your laptop that has little local storage and being able to access any of your documents you have saved, anywhere you are. We know Apple has been sniffing around this area: Steve Jobs offered to acquire Dropbox several years ago, telling its founder, Drew Houston, that it was really “a feature, not a product.” So a cloud-based storage service that perhaps developers could use for their own apps? Doesn’t sound too far out there.
• Location. Apple bought mapping companies PlaceBase in 2009 and Poly9 in 2010. We also know the company is hiring for mapping-related positions. That sparked speculation that Apple is indeed building its own location-based service. It has some location services in action already, like Find My iPhone and Find My Friends. An interesting step would be if Apple opened up such a service as an API to its developers.
• Voice control. Siri is still in beta, which means it is not even a finished product. What will Apple do with it in years to come? A good bet is it will integrate it into more Apple devices. The future of device interfaces is more nontraditional methods of control, like voice and gestures. In other words, Siri is not an anomaly or a cute, little experiment: It’s the future. A good place to look for clues about how Apple might implement more voice control services is a patent filing Apple made, showing its interest in putting Siri in everything from Macs to cars.

It is true that Apple is not a company that has historically had great success with web-based services. Embracing networked services and the cloud means Apple inherently understands that even hardware companies that extract gazillions of dollars in profit right now can’t go another decade without this. In a way, Apple also has no choice but to pursue this. If it wants to continue to build the post-PC dream, it has to have iCloud and other connected services that connect all of its apps, services and devices.

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On Friday, IHS iSuppli is the latest to weigh in. The firm says that while Apple came in first place in the last calendar quarter of 2011 in smartphone sales with 37 million, Samsung actually took the crown of world’s largest smartphone vendor of the year with 95 million shipped. (That’s not “sold,” so this isn’t a great way to compare, as we’ve previously discussed, but it’s what we’ve got.) Apple sold 93 million iPhones during the year.

IHS iSuppli is basing its Samsung numbers on information gathered when the company announced its quarterly earnings earlier Friday. I asked iSuppli analyst Wayne Lam how he arrived at the number, and he said he was basing it off the “approximately 30 percent growth” figure Samsung publicly announced. He interpreted that as “under 30 percent but over 27 percent.”

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That’s also reflected by new research out of online portfolio manager SigFig. The site tracks more than $25 billion in its clients’ assets, and SigFig says its users are four times as likely to hold Apple in their portfolios than any other stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, so the company had a nice pool of data to tap into to analyze activity around Apple’s earnings release.

One interesting thing they discovered is that just five percent of SigFig users who own Apple actually trade it on earning days. And of that small portion that does trade the stock, the majority of activity — 60 percent — is on the buy side. According to SigFig, that could mean that these investors see Apple as a long-term holding.

SigFig put all the data into a handy infographic, which is embedded below (click to enlarge):

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Sterne Agee’s Shaw Wu has one of the more conservative estimates of Apple’s performance but still increased his firm’s price target to $550 from $540, citing the possibility of an impending iPad launch as a reason to trust in the stock’s strength:

For its outlook, AAPL guided above consensus, which is rare for a company known for its vintage conservative guidance. For the March quarter, the company is looking for $32.5 billion in revenue and $8.50 in EPS vs. consensus at $32 billion and $8.03 in EPS. While AAPL does not pre-announce future products, we believe this guidance implies that there could be an iPad update in the quarter, which is consistent with what we have been seeing in our supply chain checks.

Brian White of Ticonderoga Securities was far less conservative, raising Apple’s stock price target to $666. He talks about how Apple “crushed” Ticonderoga’s previous projections with its results in a note released on Tuesday evening, and he argues that Apple has room to run:

[T]his is clearly a quarter to remember and speaks to the momentum at Apple that we believe has further room to run, ultimately driving the stock to our 12-month price target of $666.

Canaccord Genuity’s Michael Walkley also raised his target beyond the $600 mark, increasing it to $650 from $560. He anticipates that Apple’s results might prompt the company to change its policy on paying dividends (via Forbes):

We believe Apple is likely to announce a dividend during 2012, potentially next quarter when crossing $100B in cash and cash equivalents.  We view this as very bullish for investors, as we believe a new group of investors seeking dividends would invest in Apple and drive shares higher.

Deutsche Bank also raised its estimates, putting Apple’s new target price at $600. Analyst Chris Whitmore said in a note to investors (via StreetInsider) that his firm also expects additional gains from a new iPad release:

[W]e expect iPad 3 in C1Q12 followed by an iPhone 5 refresh in the Fall. In addition, we expect Macs with Ivy Bridge should support incremental share gains and Apple TV appears set to graduate from an ‘Apple hobby’ later this year.

The list is much longer, of course, and Apple’s stock performance in early trading on Wednesday reflects the general optimism: As of this writing, it was sitting at around $447 per share, up $26.60 from Tuesday’s close.

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He predicted record-breaking numbers in October, when he estimated $37 billion in revenue and earnings of $9.30 per share. Watchers of the company on Wall Street were anticipating revenue between $35.3 billion and $41.8 billion and earnings between $8.88 and $11.45 per share. Apple smashed both those predictions. Cook also said it would be the biggest iPhone quarter ever, and it was. It was also Apple’s biggest iPad and Mac quarter, too.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the main product lines sales:

• 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.
• 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, a 111 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter.
• 5.2 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter.
• 15.4 million iPods, a 21 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

For all products, Apple says international sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Cook crowed about the results in a press release about the results, and even threw out a bit about future products: “We’re thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs,” said Cook. “Apple’s momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline.”

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Apple has updated the iBooks app, now called iBooks 2, and with that comes a whole new category on the iBookstore for textbooks with material from the big publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson, as well as other authors who want to sell their textbooks and learning tools there. And the really killer part of this is the easy publishing tool, iBooks Author, which is free and replicates an iWork experience, like building a presentation in Keynote, into a click-and-drag method of building a textbook. It’s not just for compiling material from scratch though; it’s very clearly tailored for already published material to be imported and easily formatted as an iBook.

But what you make with the authoring tool isn’t really a textbook. It’s an interactive learning experience. You have text, of course, but you can drag in image galleries, embed videos, 3D models, presentations and slideshows. You can touch and swipe and watch instead of just reading and taking notes. (If I was in high school today, I might actually find chemistry class as interesting as history with these very tangible, engaging tools.)

When students are interacting with these books, they can also touch to highlight, look up information, search, take notes in the margins and compile instant flashcards for studying. You can do all that with a physical book, but not with a couple of touches and swipes.

Matt MacInnis, CEO of Inkling, which makes similar digital interactive textbooks, but for the higher education market, says this is the reason his company doesn’t call them textbooks. They use the term “smartbooks.”

The traditional textbook “is going to have to go away,” he said in an interview last week. “The future of publishing is learning software and analytics and feedback and rich technology.”

For a generation of students that grew up using the web and social networks and is addicted to a constant stream of information, the interactive part is what makes learning something that grabs students’ attention. The feedback part is also really important. Apple hits that note with its study guides and review sections at the end of iBooks chapters.  Along with the standard questions, there comes the instant feedback of answers, so the learning process is immediate.

Joining a crowded field

Apple is certainly not the only company working on interactive textbooks or a digital education platform. Kno is one of the largest providers of textbooks for the iPad. Chegg just introduced a really nice e-book reader for a variety of platforms, and Inkling has been making interactive textbooks (and cookbooks) like this for a while — but has a number of books that’s only in the triple digits. What Apple is offering is a platform that lets anyone make these interactive books. There are already 20,000 textbooks on the iBookstore. Adding tools and important partners is guaranteed to increase that number.

So despite not being first, Apple is a force to be reckoned with in whatever industry it directs its focus on. And in this case, I think what they want, rather than disrupt the whole industry a la music and video content, is to be an assistant. The authoring tool, the distribution platform, can help drag the biggest players of a very old-school industry into the present (and hopefully, future).

And more importantly, what Apple is offering is a way to change the conversation about textbooks and bring that dialogue into the mainstream. We don’t know a lot of things yet: how many school districts can afford hundreds or thousands of iPads or how the textbook publishing industry at large will react. But we do know one thing: textbooks don’t have to be physical, expensive, static or boring.

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Even this year’s CodeMash 2.0.1.2, a developer’s conference in Sandusky, Ohio sold out in an amazing twenty minutes to over 1,200 attendees.  So rather than holding out to see if Apple expands its own event, you should check out these upcoming alternatives:

• MacIT in San Francisco at the Moscone Center Jan. 26-28, 2012.
• 360|MacDev in Denver at the Embassy Suites Feb. 3-4, 2012.
• CocoaConf in Chicago at the Elk Grove Village March 16-17, 2012.
• 360|iDev in Denver at the Crowne Plaza Sept. 2012.
• MacTech in Los Angeles Oct. 17-19, 2012

You may even be able to score an event closer to home by checking Eventbrite, or by contacting a local CocoaHead. However, if you have your heart set on attending WWDC, there may be something you can do about it.

Cult of Mac points out that there is a service that will send you an SMS message the moment WWDC tickets go on sale.  WWDC Alerts, the site  extending this offer, also has a Twitter account that you can follow if you prefer. So sign up for the alerts, monitor your Apple information channels, and you just might get in.

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Credit: M.I.C. Gadget

On the day Apple was set to sell the iPhone 4S for the first time in China, huge crowds gathered outside the Shanghai and Beijing stores and became so unruly Apple had to close the stores and SWAT teams were called in.

We mentioned the long lines on Thursday, and you can see from the pictures that there was likely going to be a supply problem compared to the sheer number of people who showed up to buy phones. It turns out a large percentage of those who showed up were resellers who were paid to stand in line to buy their maximum two iPhones per person in order to “resell the phones right in front of the store at a hefty premium,” according to Chinese gadget blog M.I.C. Gadget.

Writes Fortune:

According to eyewitness reports, fights broke out at Sanlitun among rival gangs of 30 to 50 ‘yellow bulls’ — migrant workers bused in by resellers and promised 120 yuan ($19) and a food allowance to stand in line. After waiting as much as 12 hours in temperatures that fell to -9°C, they were understandably angry when all they got for their trouble was their 10-yuan food allowance.

The Chinese blog M.I.C. Gadget reports that when an unidentified man with a bullhorn announced that the sale had been cancelled, the crowd chanted ‘Open the door!’ and ‘Liars!’ and began pelting the store with eggs.

According to reports, the Beijing store was supposed to open at 7 a.m. After some fights had broken out prior to that, Apple delayed the opening. That made the crowds angrier, and the raw eggs were hurled once the store decided to remain closed and not sell the phones. Pictures from the scene show that SWAT teams were called in to disperse the unruly crowd. Apple then decided to close its four other stores in China for the day.

It is still possible to buy the iPhone 4S in China, just not in a store for the time being. Instead Apple is pointing customers to its online store or carrier partners.

This is not the first time that violence has marred an Apple store event in China. A fight broke out at the same Beijing store when the white iPhone 4 first went on sale in May 2011.

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Photos from Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo clearly show huge crowds at the two Beijing and three Shanghai locations, despite temperatures between 32 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The lineups are likely for people who want to try to get an iPhone off-contract and unlocked, starting at 4,988 yuan, or around $790. Shoppers can also buy directly from China Unicom, which even has some pricing plans that allow users to pick up the hardware free, but monthly contract requirements for those subsidies are quite steep. Plus, buying unlocked makes it easier for scalpers to resell devices through unofficial channels.

When it launched in the U.S., the iPhone 4S was also greeted with long lines, and in Hong Kong, attendance at Apple’s retail flagship store numbered in the thousands. The Chinese launch of the 4S should be the biggest since it debuted in October, since China is now Apple’s second-most-important market, and according to at least one estimate, it’s conceivable that Apple sold more iPhones in China during its fiscal fourth quarter of 2011 than it did in the U.S.

The staggered launch means that sales resulting from the Chinese launch of the iPhone 4S will appear as part of Apple’s second fiscal quarter results and not those that will be reported on Jan. 24. That could help Apple post higher iPhone shipments next quarter even without the holiday bump, especially if its regulatory progress with getting a China Telecom-compatible version of the 4S to market bears fruit within the next couple of months.

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Apple’s special displays were announced alongside a program of deploying small boutiques within Target’s larger stores called the “Shops at Target,” the retailer revealed. These pop-up-type shops seem to be temporary locations that will sell Target-specific goods. The arrangement with Apple is separate from the “Shops at Target” initiative, but full details are not yet known about what exactly it includes.

Target spokeswoman Dustee Jenkins told MarketWatch that Target will “have 25 stores with unique display and assortment [of inventory]” for Apple goods, but it isn’t clear where or when the stores will appear first. We have requested more information from Target and Apple and will update this story if we find out more about what is being offered and what the timeline is for the arrival of these stores.

An in-store partnership with Target should help Apple reach more markets in areas where dedicated Apple retail locations don’t make financial sense. If they do end up resembling Best Buy mini-stores, they will be staffed with knowledgeable, Apple-specific personnel and offer Mac computers and more in addition to the iOS devices currently available at Target.

Photo: Some rights reserved by Chris Coyier

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Whalen said that the company has been “talking to everybody” about Medfield and that the company first “took a conscious decision to focus on Android,” since “at the moment [Intel's] customers are asking for Android” but that iOS remains a consideration as it continues to grow. But Apple has little reason to want to open its arms to Intel’s mobile processors and plenty of reason to keep them closed, in fact.

It’s not that Intel’s efforts aren’t praiseworthy: The company needs a strong mobile platform, and Medfield looks strong. It’s an SoC that seems like it can hold its own with ARM’s latest, and there is even good reason to believe it will have a strong foothold in the Android market a year from now, not the least of which is Motorola’s endorsement of the platform.

But don’t expect to see Apple’s mobile devices rush to embrace x86 architecture anytime soon. Cupertino has done a lot to make sure that it maintains total control over its chip designs, which are based on licensed ARM architecture. It has acquired two chip-making firms and no doubt worked out extensive, high-volume fabrication contracts with chip-making partners like Samsung to ensure that it can deliver an SoC that is carefully tailored to work with its mobile software and hardware. That affords it advantages when it comes to system performance, power consumption and more; so much of an advantage, in fact, that an analyst recently said Apple had a leg up on Intel when it came to mobile chips.

Apple may have switched to Intel from PowerPC, a tech it helped create, for its Mac line of computers, but the mobile market is not the PC market. Intel still has plenty to prove when it comes to its ability to operate in the realm of smartphones and tablets, and for now, Apple has invested years of development time and huge amounts of money in making ARM-based designs that perfectly suit its software and hardware.

Apple’s recent acquisition of Anobit shows that it wants more, not less control over its product components. That desire for control combined with Whalen’s caginess when talking about Apple specifically lead me to believe it will still be a long time (if ever) before we see Intel architecture in an iOS device.

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