• Apple number cruncher Horace Dediu at Asymco took at stab at calculating how much of Apple’s revenue comes from Google. What he came up with suggests that Apple makes more money from Google than Google does from Android:  ”$1.4 billion from Google to Apple vs. $600 million from Android to Google.” Read his analysis to find out how he got there.
• Turns out the Apple retail juggernaut he helped create can’t be duplicated in a few quarters. Former Apple VP and current J.C. Penny CEO Ron Johnson is coming under fire from his investors for falling sales and a huge stock drop just six months after he joined, Reuters reports.
• There’s been a lot of talk about Apple doing a MacBook with a high-resolution Retina display. Sounds great, but how feasible would that be? ZDNet does the analysis.
• The Flashback malware threat exposed some serious lapses in Mac security. But what did the creators get out of it? Pretty much nothing, according to Symantec: The botnet “managed to generate around 400,000 ad clicks out of roughly 10 million being displayed,” and they’re having trouble collecting from pay-per-click services who employ anti-fraud measures, says Ars Technica.
• Just a day after Greenpeace protested outside Apple’s headquarters about its data center’s reliance on coal power, Reuters reports that Apple plans to build solar farms next to its North Carolina data center and move toward only renewable resources at the site by the end of this year. Katie wrote about this earlier in the year.

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The solution comes in three flavors: 100% Natural, Triple Strength (which also disinfects), and a deep cleaning gel. The bigger packages include a 240 mL bottle to keep at home or the office and a 60 mL bottle (small enough to get through TSA screening) to carry with you. They also include a cloth with a heavy nap good for picking up dust and dirt. The Deep Cleaning gel comes with a smaller, chamois-style cloth.

I started with the Triple Strength solution and cleaned up my screens with a couple spritzes. It features a non-drip formula that’s safe to spray directly on your screen, but old habits die hard, and I still sprayed the solution on to the cloth, wiped it on the screen, and then used the dry side to finish. The results were impressive, but nothing I wasn’t used to with other cleaners.

The real surprise was that after a day or two of use, there was a noticeable difference. I had far less dust on my MacBook Pro screen and far fewer fingerprints on my iPhone compared to usual. I definitely noticed that my iPhone was still looking great after two days. Sure enough, I went back to the packaging and found that the Antec cleaning solution is anti-static and fingerprint resistant. Color me impressed.

The 100% Natural solution has the same anti-static and fingerprint resistant qualities, but forgoes the chemical additives that add non-drip and disinfectant properties to the Triple Strength variety. Both types are available in a few different combo packages, some of which include wipes in individual travel packets.

I found all the above Antec cleaners at Newegg.com at a pretty good discount off retail too. So not only does this stuff work really nice and keep my screen clean for longer than with the competition’s products, it’s actually cheaper too. Love it.

Disclaimer: Antec provided the products for review.

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Credit: ifoAppleStore.com

As Apple has added to its collection of retail stores around the world, it has also been upping the ante on the stores’ design and architectural flourishes, from the 5th Avenue “cube” store in New York City to the Shanghai store with the clear glass cylinder.

Apple is getting even fancier for its proposed new flagship store in Aix en Provence, France, set to open in late 2012 or early 2013: It is doing away with walls almost entirely and going for an all-glass structure (as seen in the rendering above), with the exception of a rear wall for offices and inventory. IfoAppleStore.com reports that the glass will be “enabled by new technology developed by Apple’s glass suppliers.”

The newest store is clearly an eye-popping and accurate expression of Apple as a company in one way: It shows its love of and appreciation for design. But the design analogy of almost total transparency? Not so much.

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Beyond the mind-boggling number of people that show up for store-related events like this such as the first day of sales for iPhones or iPads, it’s always rather amazing to see the sheer number of employees on hand. The red shirts in the picture taken at the opening on Friday are the employees. And fittingly, on Friday, Horace Dediu at Asymco put together a chart that details how much all those employees make for Apple.

Credit: Fortune/PED

The data has been pulled together by ifoAppleStore, but the calculations are Dediu’s. They show Apple Store revenues over the past decade they’ve been open for business, which helps us more easily visualize some interesting take-aways about how much each Apple Store employee brings in for the company.

Credit: Asymco

So far, through three quarters of 2011, Apple Stores have made $14 billion in revenue and $3.1 billion in profit on 358 stores (not including the just-opened Grand Central Terminal venue) with something north of 30,000 employees.

The chart shows that while the amount of revenue the stores are making in 2011 per visitor has gone up in the last year, the average revenue brought in by each employee has gone down.

According to Dediu, Apple retail outlets last year brought in revenue of $481,000 per employee, but that number has dipped in 2011 to $320,000, but again, it’s not including the last — and likely most important — quarter when holiday shopping gets done.

Meanwhile, he has calculated that the revenue that comes on average when a person steps into an Apple Store is $45, based on the quarter of a billion visitors the stores see every year.

It’s clear it’s not that Apple is making less money in its stores. But it appears Apple is diluting the revenue per employee by opening more stores and hiring more people.

Either way, it’s clear Apple has this retail game down. It may have lost the head architect of its physical stores strategy in Ron Johnson (who left recently to become CEO of JC Penney), but it’s still making improvements, with the EasyCheckout method of purchasing products via an iOS device in store and the new option to pick up online orders in stores shows. And in the other telling sign, after a decade, people will still show up in throngs just to be the first inside a new store.

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Due to reconfiguration of store displays and staff, Fortt says Apple can actually better supervise the door and make sure people walking out with items legitimately should be. Plus, it keeps staff free for the more important tasks of doing product demos and helping shoppers who haven’t already made up their minds about what to purchase.

Fortt’s source, someone “familiar with Apple’s retail operation,” says the benefits of the new EasyPay system outweigh the downsides, something which will lead Apple to make it a feature “prominently touted” at Apple’s new Grand Central Terminal store in New York City, which is set to open Dec. 9. If self-checkout really is doing as well as Fortt’s source seems to think it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple made encouraging its use at new location a standard practice, both through staff advocacy and physical layout.

Self-checkout is undoubtedly going to require a lot of initial investment in terms of making sure customers know about it and know how to use it. But if it’s already performing well by Apple’s standards, that’s a very good sign for the future, since as adoption increases it should cut down on Apple’s retail staffing costs and allow for even bigger profit margins for the brick-and-mortar stores.

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Apple will pay $60 per square foot for the 23,000 square-foot space. It’s apparently the best lease held among all other retail stores open for business in the transportation center. According to the Post:

Critics likewise note that Apple’s $60-a-square-foot lease is well below what many other tenants are paying — including a future Shake Shack burger joint that will be shelling out more than $200 a square foot, according to the leases, copies of which have been obtained by The Post.

That’s a sign that Apple drove a hard bargain with the MTA — despite the fact that the public agency’s budget squeezes are pushing up fares for subway straphangers and suburban commuters across the region.

Apple will also not be required to share any of its profits with the MTA, which differs with the lease agreements of every other Grand Central tenant with the exception of a Chase bank ATM, according to the report.

To give an idea of how much extra Apple will be able to keep under this arrangement, consider that Apple does about $400 million in sales in its other flagship NYC store on 5th Avenue, which is 10,000 square feet and open 24 hours a day. With the standard arrangement in place to pay a certain amount in proceeds to its landlord for that store, Apple has paid $15 million on that $400 million. The Grand Central store will have more than twice the square footage of the 5th Avenue location.

This is sort of like how wealthy celebrities are the ones constantly being given a bunch of free stuff: Even though they can afford to buy what’s being given away, brands want to give them stuff because the allure of a famous person using your product can bring other benefits to the brand. The MTA is saying it’s happy with the deal, because it will “generate significant new traffic” for other retailers when shoppers wander in to find the Apple Store.

But it’s also yet another way to gauge the kind of power and influence Apple wields in retail. In 10 years Apple stores have gone from being predicted to fail to bringing in more revenue per square foot than any other major retailer, and being the must-have store for major retail complexes.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ceiling

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Apple was second only to Amazon.co.uk, and beat out Argos, which has been at the top of the list along with Amazon’s U.K site since Hitwise began its rankings. In October 2011, the Apple site accounted for 1 in every 25o visits made by U.K. browsers, according to the information gathered by Experian Hitwise.

Part of the reason for the huge volume increase in traffic, which spiked in October, is the death of former Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs. Jobs passed away Oct. 5, just a day after Apple announced the iPhone 4S. The combination of the two led to Apple reaching its highest-ever levels of Internet traffic, with 14 million visits coming to the site in October alone.

Hitwise also cited the iPad as another cause of high traffic for Apple, since tablet popularity overall is a growing driver of web traffic. Amazon experienced a lift thanks to its Kindle Fire, for instance, and in addition to its U.K site topping the list, Amazon’s U.S. shopping portal even made the U.K. rankings, coming in ninth.

Apple’s surge in retail web rankings may not last, but a six-place jump is nothing to scoff at, even if it is a temporary boost dictated by extremely unusual circumstances. If Apple dips back down next quarter, it probably won’t fall all the way back, since some of those new visitors will probably stick around to keep tabs on what’s coming next, specifically to look for clues about iPad 3, which is starting to become a popular target for the rumor mill.

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According to Bloomberg, despite Apple’s hiring in August of executive talent search firm Egon Zehnder International, it may instead end up hiring someone internally if an outside search isn’t coming up with any results. An earlier report from Cult of Mac had pegged Apple’s current VP of Retail, Steve Cano, as Johnson’s replacement, but Apple refuted those claims.

Apple said via a spokesperson that its “search is under way with lots of interest,” and noted that the company is “carefully selecting Ron’s successor,” in a statement to Bloomberg. But in the meantime, it’s hardly business as usual for Apple Retail stores.

Just last week, Apple launched its revamped iOS Apple Store application, which provides ship-to-store ordering and EasyPay self-payment options to U.S. Apple retail locations. I argued that this represents another potential revolution sparked by Apple in brick-and-mortar sales, and now there’s a new report circulating that more changes are still to come.

On Saturday, 9t05Mac reported Apple will be making iPads the new wonder tool of the Apple Store Genius Bar, replacing MacBook Pros that have long been in service. Geniuses toting iPads would employ special software to determine if a user’s device was eligible for repair, diagnose problems and even order replacement parts. For Apple, this represents cost-savings; an iPad is much cheaper than a MacBook Pro, after all. But the real benefit will be for customers seeking Genius help, since it’ll make Genius work spaces less cluttered and more comfortable, and keep Geniuses much more mobile.

So despite Apple’s lack of a formal helmsman in place for its retail operations, the ship is sailing quite nicely, and even venturing outside its established routes. Good to see that even with a hugely successful retail model already in place, and in the midst of a highly transitional period, Apple still strives to bring its A-game to an area where it continues to have a steady, albeit les- publicized impact on a global scale.

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On Tuesday, BGR reported that Apple will be introducing a new iOS retail store app, and this new app will allow for online ordering with in-store pick up, and also for customer self-checkout for some items. Both would represent major steps toward minimizing or eliminating the hassle of paying for goods at brick-and-mortar retail locations, making for an Apple shopping experience that makes actually buying things almost as painless as window shopping.

A shift more dramatic in concept than in practice

The process for self-checkout seems a little sci-fi as reported by BGR’s sources: Apparently, you’ll scan items using your iOS device’s camera, then click purchase, whereupon your Apple ID (and associated payment method) is charged, after which you can walk out with the product.

But though it seems far-fetched, other companies are already attempting similar things, including PayPal and AisleBuyer. Also, it isn’t too different from the system in place now: Associates often let you leave with product in hand, maybe with a paper receipt but often not, and sometimes with a small sticker indicating you paid. I always feel like I’m getting away with something when I leave an Apple Store even now.

For larger items, you’ll be able to buy in advance, and either pick up the item within 12 minutes if it’s in stock, or have it shipped free to a store if not. Retail locations will also reportedly gain the ability to receive custom-configured Macs shipped to store, which will finally remove one of the biggest barriers tweak-happy consumers like myself encounter when trying to use them. Again, this is a small difference from what’s currently on offer, but could do much to change the perception of Apple retail for consumers who have traditionally avoided storefronts.

Not the first; hasn’t stopped Apple before

Other companies have done ship-to-store before. Best Buy and The Source here in Canada have both offered those options for quite a while now. But as Apple has proven time and time again, the difference between offering something and getting it exactly right can also be the difference between failure and runaway success. In my experience of ship-to-store programs offered by other retailers, I’ve never had the process go entirely smoothly, and service in practice always differed from what was advertised.

If Apple can pull off what this report says it will attempt, it will be bridging the gap between online sales and brick-and-mortar retail in a real and lasting way that should benefit both sides of the business. Customers who once avoided retail sales will use them for the sake of convenience (in-store pickup eliminates the need to be home to receive a package), and retail customers will encounter less frustration with finding an available sales associate or navigating Apple’s sometimes inconvenient distributed checkout system.

Products, not sales, taken to the extreme

Finally, these advances would bring the Apple Store a little more in line with Steve Jobs’ vision of the perfect retail experience. Store space could be given over almost entirely to hands-on product demo and samples, and to Genius Bar tech support and setup assistance.

Apple once revolutionized retail by replacing the focus on sales and inventory with emphasis on product knowledge and sales associates who behave more like tour guides than confidence men cruising for marks. Now, it could do so all over again by taking transactions off of the retail floor altogether, and leaving just products and first-hand experience of the same by curious customers.

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The increase was pointed out on Monday by Analyst Maynard Um of UBS in a research note.

A chunk of that new investment will, no surprise, go toward its retail operations. The company will spend $900 million on its stores in 2012, up from $614 million this past year.

Apple Stores have been growing rapidly, particularly outside the U.S., and especially in the greater China region. Apple opened 30 new stores in the  most recent quarter alone, to bring the total to 357. CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted on Apple’s earnings call two weeks ago that the company would be opening 40 new stores in 2012, and “75 percent of those will be outside the U.S.” He also noted that Apple would be “replacing” some of the company’s higher-volume stores here in the U.S.

The rest of the $7.1 billion in extra capital expenditures is listed as “other.” From the 10-K:

The Company anticipates utilizing approximately $8.0 billion for capital expenditures during 2012, including approximately $900 million for retail store facilities and approximately $7.1 billion for product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements.

So some of the money is going to be spent on building the company’s new “spaceship” headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. and equipment for its manufacturers, but IT systems hardware, software and “enhancements” is almost certainly pointing to the company’s ongoing data center project and, by definition, its cloud infrastructure. (See also Horace Dediu’s examination of the data and how capex can be used to foreshadow iOS device volume production.)

Apple is building out a gigantic data center in North Carolina, and perhaps even a solar farm to power it — if reports are correct. That data center will support its cloud operations, and could increase the capacity and eventually lower costs for the maintenance of Apple’s iCloud service. Apple would never be accused of  jumping on the cloud bandwagon early, but spending billions more underlines the fact that the company has much bigger plans for iCloud.

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