Appletell

Apple is getting sick of all the iPhone clones overseas and is beginning to crack down on sellers of the devices.  It is known that the most clones are showing up in China, where Apple’s iPhone is too expensive for most of the consumers.  For example, Apple has began to pursue legal action against such sellers as Digital Playworld.  According to Playworld’s managing director, they had to remove all the clones from their website, promise to not sell any more clones, and tell Apple who supplied them with the products and how much was payed for them.  This was done to avoid a harsh lawsuit against the company.

In their letter to the company, Apple stated that the clone “looks very like the iPhone.” It appears that Apple has had enough and is no longer ignoring the issue.  Hopefully these clones help Apple realize that they need to drop the price if they really want the phone to succeed.  Despite all this, Apple has reported in its second quarter press release that 1,703,000 iPhones have been sold in this quarter.

Via [MacNN]

After a rather dismal first part of the calendar year, with AAPL shedding over $80 at its worst, things are looking very up for Apple, with many analysts reversing their downgrading of stock estimates for the company.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky raised his target price to $190 a share, Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey raised his call on AAPL from $175 to $185. Citigroup set a $212 price target. Thomas Weisel Partners raised their call to $195, all in the past week. The consensus seems to be that while iPod/iPhone sales are slower, Mac sales haven’t been better and will boost the company to yet another successful quarter.

On Wednesday, Apple will broadcast it’s 2nd Quarter 2008 Result Conference Call on the web. Last time they had a conference call, they had a record breaking quarter but all anyone could focus on was the fact that iPod sales weren’t fantastic, but rather steady year over year. This sent the stock into a downturn. MacRumors compiled a little list of all that has happened this quarter:

On the Mac front, the early portion of this quarter saw the release of upgraded Mac Pros and Xserves just prior to Macworld San Francisco, with the new MacBook Air following suit at the expo. New Penryn-based MacBook Pros and MacBooks followed at the end of February.

This quarter also saw the release of Time Capsule, revitalized AppleTV and AirPort Express offerings, and higher-capacity models of the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPod shuffle. Also of note, Apple released a limited beta version of the iPhone 2.0 software, including a Software Development Kit (SDK) to allow developers to create third-party applications for the iPhone.

Listen into the call this Wednesday [Apple.com]

Market research firm Gartner released a report Wednesday showing that Apple’s market share for personal computers in the US is now 6.6%, a nice step up from the 5.2% they were at.  Shipping over 1.01 million machines, Apple is now the fourth under Dell, HP, and Acer respectively in the US market.  Unfortunately, Apple has not yet made the top 5 list when it comes to computer producers worldwide.  That list contained HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, and Toshiba respectively.  However, Apple has still made some very steady growth this quarter which is one thing they can be proud of.

One strong point in sales for all the companies was mobile platforms, or laptops.  This is no surprise as laptops are becoming very powerful and people are becoming more mobile.  “Despite declining consumer confidence, U.S. consumers did not put off mobile PC purchases as evidenced by solid mobile growth,” Mika Kitagawa, principal analyst for Gartner said. “This growth was stimulated in part by aggressive price cuts.” Keep up the good work Apple, I would love see you on that worldwide list next quarter!

Via [AppleInsider]