Xerox technology chief Sophie Vandebroek is placing bets on technologies to spur growth. Image: Xerox

Xerox (XRX) PARC has come a long way. A generation ago, the Palo Alto Research Center famously developed many of the technologies that led to modern PCs from folks like Apple (AAPL) and Dell (DELL), but never got them beyond the lab. Today the unit is determined to get its inventions out of the lab, even if it means sacrificing secrecy.

To underscore that point, the company's normally secretive Silicon Valley researchers and their colleagues from around the world held an open house this week to show off surprising projects they're developing. Among them: A blood scanner that uses a twist on laser printing technology to spot rogue cells, a type of paper that can be erased by ultraviolet light and reused, and a new hybrid plastic that's partly made of corn and grass. More

Catching up on the latest Apple (AAPL) iPhone news after spring break isn't easy. The rumors are coming so fast they've started to crash into each other. Here's a summary:

• Price: Two versions, $399 (8GB) and $499 (16GB), but AT&T (T) will knock $200 off the price in return for a 2-year contract (Fortune's Scott Moritz); Apple will charge $599 for unlocked (NYTimes's Saul Hansell); AT&T will raise the price of its unlimited data plan from $20 to $45, to match what it charges customers using the RIM (RIMM) BlackBerry. (Hansell)
• Form: About the same shape and size, but "somewhat fatter" (Engadget's Ryan Block); 2.5 mm "thinner" (TGDaily's Richard Felton); 38 to 48 grams lighter (CENS's Ken Liu);
• Screen: Same size and resolution (Block); screen shrunk from 3.5 inch to 2.8 inch diagonally (Liu)
• Case: Less "plasticky" (Felton); more plastic, replacing aluminum-magnesium casing (Liu)
• Manufacturer: Hon Hai has orders to make 300,000 3G iPhones initially and 3 million in June (Liu) for a total of 24-25 million in its life cycle (Digitimes' Steve Shen). CENS's Ken Liu goes on to claim that the giant Taiwanese manufacturer took the job away from Foxconn, apparently unaware that Foxconn and Hon Hai are the same company. (link)

[Update: the stores are back up and sure enough, the iMac product line has been updated. Same prices, better specs. Apple press release here.]

Apple's online stores were closed early Monday around the world, a pretty dependable sign that new products were about to be announced.

The most likely candidate: an upgraded iMac. Last week Geeksugar, a rumor site with a good track record, passed along word that Apple would soon be refreshing its line of desktop computers with bigger hard drives and faster (presumable Intel Penryn) processors. (link)

According to AppleInsider, a memo out of Cupertino gave some of Apple's (AAPL) U.S. retail partners a heads-up on the new iMacs and that placeholders for the computers have appeared on BestBuy's computers. (link)

The successor to the original 1998 Bondi-blue iMac G3, the current Intel (INTC) Core 2 Duo aluminum iMac was introduced Aug. 7 in two models, a 20" and a 24".

Apple usually announces new products on Tuesdays.

Well, that's one way to clear your shelves of excess inventory.

Eight days after O2 and Carphone Warehouse, Apple's U.K. distributors, tried to rid themselves of unsold iPhones by instituting a 100 pound (37%) price cut on the 8GB model, the extra phones have all but disappeared.

On Thursday, Carphone, Europe's largest independent mobile phone retailer, alerted advertisers that the sale had done its work: the 8GB models were gone and would probably not be replaced. Pocket-lint, a British gadget site, posted a copy of the message:

"Thanks to the most phenomenal response to the promotion, The Carphone Warehouse is now out of stock on the Apple iPhone. Please can you remove all reference to the iPhone promotion in your copy. We apologise for the short notice but would like to thank everyone who participated in the campaign. Carphone do not expect to receive any additional stock at this time." (link)

The news follows a week of intense activity at both Carphone and O2 stores. According to a report last week in Britain's Mobile Today, sales at Carphone's flagship store on London’s Oxford Street had doubled from 30 per day to 60 after the promotion was announced. "We usually sell one or two a day," one staffer told the website, "but yesterday we sold about 20 – it was like launch day again." (link)

8GB iPhones were also sold out last week at O2 stores in Newcastle, Birmingham and London, but O2, the British arm of Spain's Telefónica, hopes to replenish its supply. The 16GB model is selling for full price and is still in stock.

The price cuts were part of a global effort to clear inventory of first-generation iPhones in advance of the so-called 3G iPhone, widely expected to be announced in June — perhaps as early as June 9, according to a CitiBank report issued on Thursday.

Although Apple (AAPL) has been having trouble meeting demand for iPhones in its U.S. stores, sales have been sluggish in Europe. The reaction to the O2 and Carphone promotion suggest that it was price, not lack of 3G connectivity, that was hampering sales — at least in the United Kingdom.

In France, where iPhones have not yet been marked down, it costs 399 euros to buy an 8GB model (VAT included), or $626. As Silicon Alley Insider points out, it's cheaper to ask a friend to pick one up on vacation in the United States, where the same phone sells for for $399, and unlock it.

It's not clear what's going on in Germany, where T-Mobile slashed 8GB iPhone prices 75% to 99 euros ($155), but it still seems to have plenty in stock.

By midday Thursday the market seemed to have shaken off lingering concerns from Apple's second-quarter earnings report and conference call — chief among them CFO Peter Oppenheimer's usual conservative earnings guidance for the coming quarter ($1 per share vs. the Street's consensus of $1.10) and lower-than-expected gross margin (32.9% vs. consensus $34%). As if there was something wrong with 33% gross margins.

But morning-after analysis by American Technology Research's Shaw Wu found several points of concern going forward, one of which was new to us.

iPhone users, it seems, are "bandwidth hogs" to an extent that could affect Apple's (AAPL) dealings with cellular carriers and sales to new users. As Wu put it Wednesday in a report to clients:

Our sources indicate that the success of iPhone with its Safari web browser is putting strain on AT&T's (T) EDGE network in areas with higher user density. We have been told that iPhone users are consuming "well over" 100 MB per month (compared to Blackberry around 10 MB). The relative economics to the carrier is unfavorable with actually lower net revenue while using considerably more network resources. To us, lower economic returns to carriers will mean lower subsidies relative to other platforms. This will put more of a cost burden on the consumer. We believe many consumers will pay up for AAPL products, but this could limit the elasticity of adoption somewhat.

This won't be as much of an issue when the faster 3G iPhone arrives, but Wu doesn't subscribe to the conventional wisdom that the iPhone will arrive in June — at least not in large numbers. He's thinking maybe July. The "timing of a broad 3G roll-out at AT&T is unclear to us," he writes. "And in our experience, these types of significant network roll-outs tend to take longer than consensus thinking."

While the iPhone is nowhere near as important as the Mac for Apple in terms of revenue — only 2% to 3% of Apple's business, by Wu's calculation — it looms large in the perception of investors and in the stock's current capitalization. "If short-term numbers disappoint," Wu writes, "we believe investors may discount their future expectations of iPhone potential and its shares could see additional pressure."

As for the rest of Apple's earning report, Wu summarizes it neatly in his patented bulls vs. bears analysis:

The Bulls Will Point To:

Europe (24%) and Asia-Pacific (8%) sales were very strong, up 43% Y/Y and 37% Y/Y, respectively, while the Americas (44%) grew 34% Y/Y.

Japan (4%) continued its rebound for the second quarter in a row, growing 50% Y/Y after about six quarters of sluggish growth.

Mac shipments grew 51% Y/Y to 2.3 million units, above our forecast of 2.15 million, and at the upper-end of 2.2-2.3 million expectations. ASPs came in at $1526, remaining at their high level above $1500, indicating a favorable mix towards the high-end.

iPods came in 10.6 million units above our forecast of 10 million (also consensus). ASPs remained fairly robust at $171 but down 6% Q/Q.

AAPL shipped 1.7 million iPhones, above our estimate of 1.5 million and within the higher 1.7-2 million expectations.

Inventory declined 21% Q/Q to $364 million from $459 million last quarter.

Net cash grew to $19.5 billion, up from $18.5 billion last quarter, helped by strong cash flow from operations. Net cash per share is now $21.63 per share, up from $20.50 per share.

DSOs remained at low levels of 19 days vs. 18 last quarter.

The Bears Will Point To:

Its June quarter guidance is somewhat conservative going back to AAPL's typical pattern. The company has now given conservative guidance seven out of eight quarters.

The gross margin came in at 32.9%, above its guidance of 32% but below our estimate of 33.5% and consensus expectations of ~34%.

iPod units grew only 1% Y/Y to 10.6 units, continuing the recent trend of single-digit growth.

AAPL may be susceptible to a slow-down in US consumer spending.

AAPL's accounting treatment of iPhone and Apple TV revenue where hardware revenue is amortized over 2 years or 8 quarters remains somewhat confusing and is unprecedented

Microsoft stock has crept higher since it sank three months ago on word of its Yahoo bid.

Can Microsoft do it again?

Late last year, investors and analysts were wringing their hands over a tech stock collapse. With the economy starting to slow, investors punished a slew of big techs including Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). Not even hot-growth companies like Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM) were spared.

Then Microsoft reported earnings in January, and the sun came out: $6.5 billion in profit for the holiday quarter on sales of $16.4 billion. And best of all, the forecast was bright. "We actually feel very optimistic," said Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell. "The next six months we feel very good about." More

The MacBook Air was a top-seller for Apple last quarter, helping to deliver the equivalent of a second holiday season. Image: Apple

iPod growth has stalled. The iPhone is basically doing as expected. So in Apple's financial results, the real surprise was the MacBook Air.

This time, gadgets didn't save the day for Apple (AAPL). Even after adding a pink iPod nano to its lineup in time for Valentine's Day, the company sold just 100,000 more iPods in the first three months of this year than it did a year before. iPhone sales came in 26 percent (or 600,000 units) lower than the holiday quarter, which isn't a great sign. More

With Apple's second-quarter earnings due Wednesday, some of the two dozen analysts who follow the stock have dusted off their spreadsheets, taken a fresh look at their models, and come to some last-minute conclusions.

The trend, starting with MacBook sales, is mostly bullish for Apple (AAPL); the four analysts we know of who have published new reports in the past 24 hours have pushed their Macintosh sales estimates up 100,000 to 300,000 above the Street consensus of 2.0 million. Their estimates of iPod sales, by contrast, fall below the 10.7 million consensus target. Their iPhone numbers are all over the lot, ranging from 1.5 to 2 million. For why this may be so, see Apple Q2 earnings: What to watch.

The exception to this bullish sentiment is Shaw Wu of American Technology Research. A long-time Apple supporter, he issued a turnabout report on Tuesday in which he downgraded the stock from Buy to Neutral, warning clients that Apple's shares are near his target of 175, with only 4% appreciation ahead of it and a 15% to 20% downside risk. "We continue to be upbeat on the potential for a strong 2H product roll-out," he writes. "However, we are concerned there could be a vacuum before then. Our supply chain checks indicate 3G iPhones will not likely ship in volume until July and new Macs until the Sept. quarter, likely putting stress on the June quarter."

Below: our working spreadsheet of the latest estimates (e-mail subscribers click here). If you're an analyst and want your numbers added to the list, you can e-mail me here.

Looking for analyts' target prices? Mike from Helsinki early Tuesday posted a summary on TMO's Apple Finance Board. Here's his list, edited slightly for clarity:

Daedalus Capital: $300 by the end of this year, $600 during next year

Piper Jaffray: $250

Needham: $235

Friedman, Billings, Ramsey: $225

Lehman Bros.: $195

CitiBank: $212

RBC Capital:$190

Merrill Lynch: $180

Morgan Stanley: $175

Goldman Sachs $185

Caris & Co.: $170

Downgrade

Morgan Keegan: $133

[Update: Reader Terry Gregory points out that he maintains a complete list of brokerage targets for Apple, color coded for upgrades and downgrades, at AAPLinvestors.net. Click here.]

Apple is set to release its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, and by coincidence its shares closed on Friday at just over $161 — almost exactly where they stood three months earlier, before Apple's first-quarter earnings report.

Although the company in January posted the best earnings in its 32-year history, the Q1 report is remembered by investors as a disaster. In the weeks that followed, Apple (AAPL) shares fell more than 40 points — from above $160 to below $120 — knocking $36.5 billion off the company's market capitalization. Recession fears were a big factor in what turned out to be a three-month bungee jump, but what really spooked the market was Apple's Q2 earnings guidance: 94 cents per share, nearly 15% below the Street's average estimate of $1.09. [Reader "Mick" points out that hedge funds dumping Apple to prop up their shaky financial positions played a major role in the sell-off. He notes that institutions held 71% of Apple's shares before the plunge and 68% after.]

So there are two things to watch for on Wednesday: 1) Apple's sales figures for Q2, which should be stellar, and 2) what kind of guidance it gives for Q3, which is anybody's guess.

All signs point to an excellent second quarter for Apple. The consensus of analysts surveyed Monday was looking for the company to earn $1.07 a share on $6.95 billion in sales, versus the company's guidance of $0.94 on $6.8 billion

Strong sales of MacBooks led the quarter. IDC last week reported that, although growth in overall PC sales in the United States slowed last quarter to just 3%, Apple's computer shipments were up 25.1%. Gartner, using slightly different methodology, reported Mac sales up 32.5%.

If Apple's worldwide performance is anything like its domestic record, the company should easily beat the Street's consensus of 1.95 million Macs sold in the quarter. Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster is looking for Mac sales of 2-2.1 million; JP Morgan's Mark Moskowitz expects them to come in even higher, at 2.11 million. Either number would represent a near doubling of sales in just two years, as Ars Technica's handy bar graph shows.

The iPod picture is not quite as rosy. There is sure to be sharp seasonal falloff from the Christmas quarter, when Apple shipped 22.1 million units. JP Morgan's Moskowitz estimates that Apple sold 9.68 million iPods in Q2; Piper Jaffray's Munster is calling for somewhere between 10 to 10.5 million, reflecting a sales spurt late in the quarter sparked by a sharp price cut on the low-end iPod shuffle. According to Munster, the Street has already decided that the iPod's days of growth are behind it, and that the consensus is looking for sales of just under 53 million iPods in 2008 — essentially unchanged from 2007. Munster's more optimistic; he believes the iPod will evolve over the next 12 months from a stand-alone music player into a mobile Internet device that fits in your pocket, and he's looking for iPod sales to grow 10% year over year.

iPhone sales are harder to predict, given the spot shortages in the United States, excess inventory in Europe, and a chaotic black market in jailbroken iPhones in Asia and the developing world. Analysts' estimates are all over the lot. Moskowitz and Munster (to pick on those two one more time) differ by half a million units. Moskowitz expects Apple to report sales of 1.5 million iPhones; Munster is looking for 1.6 to 2 million. Charles Jade at Ars Technica's Infinite Loop speculates that the release date of the 3G iPhone may hinge on what the actual number turns out to be. He writes:

With a prediction of 10 million iPhones sold in CY 2008 … Apple must sell, on average, 2.5 million iPhones per quarter. … If the iPhone sold less than 2 million units this quarter, expect a 3G iPhone sooner rather than later. Conversely, if the current shortages are a result of insatiable lust for the greatest phone ever made, expect Apple to milk that cow for all it's worth before introducing a new model. (link)

When it comes to pricing Apple's shares, however, Wall Street cares less about the past than the future. The guidance Apple gave last October hinting at a blowout Christmas surprised analysts and help drive the stock to a record $200 a share in December. Although Apple beat everybody's expectations for the quarter, by the time the first quarter results came out, traders were focused on Q2. And when Apple shocked analysts in January with surprisingly pessimistic guidance, it triggered a 40 point fall.

Investors, some of whom lost millions in the debacle, were furious, and Apple was besieged by angry threats and e-mails. ("Straight out, bald face, criminal lying," was how one described Apple's Q2 guidance). Few expect the company to respond such complaints by sweetening its numbers; if anything, it is more likely to offer no guidance at all, especially for a quarter that is so hard to call. Although investors can look forward to a new iPhone and software developers kit in June, back-to-school sales in late summer, and Christmas sales before the end of the year, none of those expectations will show up in Q3 earnings.

If Apple does offers Q3 numbers, they are sure to be, as always, conservative. Apple, more than most companies, likes to make only promises it knows it can keep. But despite recent complaints, the fact is that its results do tend to track its guidance. The spreadsheet at left, produced by a member of TMO's Apple Finance Board who calls himself "awcabot," shows guidance and results quarter by quarter since 2002. Past performance is no guarantee, but over that time, revenues have exceeded guidance fairly dependably by an average of 5.7% and earnings by an average of 43.8%.

Take all this for what it's worth. Apple is a volatile stock, and it's especially volatile before and after earnings reports. We may not be in for another bungee jump, but for the next few days it could be a bumpy ride.

Hard on the heels of a 75% price cut in Germany and 100 pounds (37%) off in the U.K. comes a report out of Paris that two high-level executives at Orange, the iPhone's wireless carrier in France, have flown to Cupertino to figure out what to do about the excess inventory piling up on their shelves.

Under a headline that reads "L'échec de l'iPhone pousse Orange et Apple à renégocier" ("The iPhone's failure forces Orange and Apple to renegotiate"), Les Echos reports that Orange executive director Louis-Pierre Wenes and marketing director Alice Holzman met with Apple COO Tim Cook earlier this week to hammer out a deal that could lead to a French price cut in the next few weeks.

The sticking point in the negotiations, according to Les Echos: Apple wants Orange to subsidize the cost of the device, as it does all its other models; Orange wants Apple, in return, to sharply reduce or drop entirely the cut it demands of each sale.

The meeting was the latest attempt to sort out the trans-Atlantic inventory imbalance has developed in advance of the second-generation iPhone (or iPhones), now widely expected to arrive in June. While the first-generation continues to sell briskly in the U.S. and has been in short supply in Apple stores for several weeks, European sales are reported to have slowed significantly in advance of the so-called 3G model.

On Friday, the London Times quoted Kathryn Huberty, an Apple (AAPL) specialist at Morgan Stanley, saying that the European carriers had become over-excited by iPhone hype last June, ordered too many, and are now facing "significant" losses on unsold stock.

Apple sold 3.71 million iPhones in the U.S. last year. According to Strategic Analytics, its European partners sold 350,000 through December, considerably less than the 500,000 to 600,000 they had hoped to sell, and only 300,000 in the first quarter of 2008.

Why Apple can't just re-balance its inventory by redirecting Europe's unsold iPhones to Apple stores in the U.S. that could use them is a mystery that has even Apple analysts scratching their heads.

"It remains puzzling that iPhone availability has been very scarce in Apple’s US stores, yet seemingly plentiful everywhere else,” Stanford Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi wrote earlier this month. "One explanation might be that because iPhone’s supply shortage came at quarter’s end, Apple chose to ship most of its iPhones to the channel, where units would be recognized as sold during the quarter, rather than re-building inventory in its US stores." (see here)

Is he right? Is Apple manipulating its shipments to dress up its Q2 report? We'll likely find out on Wednesday, when Apple reports its quarterly earnings and releases numbers on its domestic and overseas iPhone sales.