Here are your Apple rumors and news items for Wednesday:
Did iPad Sales Cut It?: Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is expected to report yet another quarter of record-breaking earnings when the market closes on Wednesday, but there are troubling hints at the results inside the company’s lawsuit against rival and component supplier Samsung. A Tuesday report at Business Insider pointed to a note written by Asymco analyst Horace Dediu highlighting a portion of Apple’s lawsuit that said that as of March 2011, Apple has sold more than 108 million iPhones and 19 million iPads worldwide. In subtracting previously released sales figures, Dediu determined that Apple sold a minimum of 18.1 million iPhones and a minimum of 4.2 million iPads. While those iPhone sales would be consistent with estimates made ahead of the Verizon (NYSE:VZ) iPhone’s release in February, iPad sales of that level are far below previous estimates. Apple was expected to sell as many as 8 million iPad during the first quarter of the calendar year. If Dediu’s calculations prove true, it will demonstrate that iPad 2 supplies have been even more constrained than previously thought.
AT&T Holds Up: AT&T (NYSE:T) shareholders were understandably concerned ahead of the release of the Verizon iPhone, what with every other research group in the world saying it would lure away one-quarter or more of the telecom’s subscribers. It turns out AT&T had nothing to worry about. With its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday, the company revealed that it activated 3.6 million iPhones during the first quarter of 2011, a boost of 33%, adding 62,000 new customers in the process. Less promising, however, were 3G iPad activations — AT&T only gained 322,000 new iPad subscribers during the quarter. This is one more piece of strong evidence that consumers are favoring the WiFi-only model of iPad.
Get To News.me: A news aggregator app for the iPad, News.me is deeply integrated with the social network Twitter, but instead of providing a service for shortening web addresses to use in tweets, News.me provides users with a tailored stream of news-related tweets. The app then lets them read the news story in full. The app was expected in Apple’s app store late last year, but the subscription-based service has been delayed repeatedly until this week, according to All Things Digital. The service costs 99 cents a week or $35 a year.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at @ajohnagnello and become a fan of InvestorPlace on Facebook.
