One mac is better than 7 PCs

"Apple brought in $4.976 billion in revenue from the sale of 3.76 million Macs last quarter. Divide the $4.976 billion in revenue by 3.76 million Macs and you get an average selling price of $1,323.40," Matt Richman blogs.

"A June 1st research note from Peter Misek of Jefferies & Company pegged Mac gross margins at 28%," Matt Richman explains. "Multiply $1,323.40 by .28 and Apple makes $370.55 for every Mac sold… HP makes $52.00 for every PC they sell."

Richman reports, "Apple makes more money from the sale of one Mac than HP does from selling seven PCs."

The full article, "A Consequence of Losing the PC Wars," here.

PIIGS

Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain or PIIGS as they are called have very limited options when it comes to saving their skin.

1. Let the Euro Fall Sharply

2. Let their economies bear the pain of a prolonged recession by pay cuts, spending cuts and higher taxes

3. Default and have a new currency and be out of the EU

If the Greeks Default can they still keep the Euro?

Here is an interesting article worth a read.

http://streetlightblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/can-greece-default-and-keep-euro.html

An Apple eating chips

Apple is now the leading consumer of chips followed by HP, Samsung, Dell and Nokia. It spends 17.5 BUSD on chips which is almost a third of its Cost of Revenue.

HP spends close to 15 BUSD.

What are the options CISCO has for a turnaround?

It is going to be long and painful but here are some options for Cisco to consider

1. Shuffle Management: Is it time to fire Chambers? For now they have hired a COO instead .

2. Lower Operating Expenses: HP and Juniper Networks, are biting into Cisco's market share and margins. Cisco could drop prices, but to keep profit margins healthy, it needs to cuts costs. This appears to be an obvious path and they have already started to offer buyouts to longtime employees and laying off non core staff.

3. Sell Non core Businesses: Cisco's foray into consumer technologies(cable TV boxes, Home networking Devices, Videoconferencing) has been a disaster. Cisco could sell or shut down other consumer businesses and get back to core business.

4. M&A: They could move into security(VMWare/Symantec), or storage(EMC). But an acquisition would be good only if it complements their core and comes as a great price. Considering the lagging stock I doubt that is a good strategy to pursue.

Battle of the Cores

The war of smartphones is now played using the number of cores that are available for increased clock speed and reduced power.

TI has it new OMAP4470, which the company expects to ship sometime in the first half of 2012. The chip sports four total cores — two ARM Cortex A9 running at up to 1.8GHz and two ARM Cortex-M3 clocked at 266MHz to handle multimedia processing. Its SGX544 graphics core is capable of pushing resolutions up to 2048 x 1536 to as many as three displays, and it supports HDMI output and stereoscopic 3D. The SGX544 is fully DX9, OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenCL 1.1, and OpenVG 1.1 compatible.

QC has the dual-core MSM8960 and quad-core APQ8064 — will fully supports Windows 8. The 8960 is currently with OEMs, while the 8064 won't ship until 2012. The updated Snapdragons boast clock speeds of up to 2.5GHz and connectivity options including Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, and FM radio. Support for NFC and stereoscopic 3D is also included, an upgraded Adreno GPUs will provide additional multimedia horsepower.

Then there is the grand daddy of all Tegra 3. This chip is amazing featuring 12 GPU cores! The resolution for this new processor does take it to the next level with 1440p! This is two times 720p and is 1.5X better then the latest 1080p. This is indeed next level of processing power and is absolutely a very adequate progression from Tegra 2, which featured only 2 cores.

Most of these chips are using 45 or 28 nm Technology.

Herding

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Android Stats

Google Android Stats as of May 2011

400,000 Activations per day of Android Devices

1 billion App downloads in 2 months

4.5 billion apps installed thus far