“We could get up in arms about China buying up America, but that’s yesterday’s news,” Hall writes. “Why shouldn’t the Chinese invest in the U.S.? Let’s take it as a sign of respect that they like what they see here — at least as far as investments go.”

“So let’s review what the Chinese government considers good investments in America,” Hall reports. “There’s Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson (two of Warren Buffett’s favorites) and China also put some cash in big banks, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

Morrison continues, “Observers have also been skeptical about Google’s decision to spend virtually nothing advertising the Nexus. Google briefly pitched the phone on its home page, but the link quickly disappeared… Perhaps more importantly, the early hype around the Nexus was quickly overshadowed by a series of reports about connectivity snafus, customer service shortcomings and eye-opening ‘recovery’ fees.”

Full article here.

“As soon as California’s Disneyland was completed, Disney knew he had made a terrible mistake by not securing the surrounding real estate,” Schwarz writes. “He had built this wonderful Walt Disney destination but his oversight allowed hotel chains and restaurants to come in and make more money off his customers than he did. So Disney immediately went to Orlando, Fla., and built Disneyworld the right way.”

“The moral of the story is that Apple isn’t something you want to depend on for your livelihood. Jobs’ goal is to build a closed digital neighborhood where Apple controls who makes money and who doesn’t,” Schwarz writes. “I’ll bet that in one of those Apple board meetings that Google CEO Eric Schmidt used to attend, he realized that Jobs was on the verge of building AppleWorld and he’s been scared ever since.”

Schwarz writes, “Google has no moat around its search. Users can change their habits in a day and they will. Jobs thinks mobile advertising is terrible and is ready to revolutionize it with Apple’s purchase of Quattro. Why should he allow Google to make money off the billboards in his neighborhood?”

Schwarz writes, “Apple’s stock is at $210, Google shares are at $585. Twenty-four months from now, the two stocks will have changed places.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

Burrows reports, “‘This rivalry is going to accelerate innovation,’ says Andreas Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and an early investor in Google. ‘Apple goes pretty fast, but having someone chasing you always makes you go faster. This is going to be good for consumers.’”

“Still, in a battle over the future of computing, friendship will almost surely be a casualty of progress,” Burrows reports. “‘You can just feel the tension rising,’ says Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. ‘Until the Nexus One, the competition was at arm’s length. But the iPhone is Apple’s darling. Now it’s personal.’”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

The Nexus One “has just had its price slashed,” Bunker reports.

“Up until today, anyone in the US who’d wanted to upgrade to the Nexus One on T-Mobile had to pay out $379,” Bunker reports. “With the price cut in effect, this figure stands at $279… Not only that, but anyone who’s already upgraded receive a $100 refund.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“But despite its 4.0 moniker and its impressive speed, Chrome for Mac is still riddled with bugs,” Lanxon reports. “Big ones, like those spiders in Eight Legged Freaks, only even more hellacious.”

“When benchmarking Chrome 4.0′s rendering speed on a PC last week, it obliterated its previous record and scored 100/100 on the Acid3 standards-compliancy tests. On the Mac, it only gets better. It completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in just 657ms. Only 4 percent faster than its PC brother, sure, but 34 percent faster than Safari 4.0.3, which scored 886ms on the same 2.0GHz Intel MacBook,” Lanxon reports. “Keeping things in some sort of delicious context, Firefox version 3.5.2 on OS X scored 1,508ms and Opera 10 beta 3 scored 5,958ms.”

Travlos writes, “Apple’s iPhone applications deliver services that users want. Users ‘opt-in’ by downloading applications on their iPhones that they want, and services are delivered by tapping an icon on their iPhone screen. This is a dramatic contrast, particularly on a mobile device, to searching for information or services. Think about it: Using an iPhone app, one can touch an application like OpenTable and make a dinner reservation. The alternative in a mobile environment is to go to your Internet browser on your phone, ‘Google’ restaurants in your area, scroll down (if you can even read the microscopic text) and then call to make a reservation. Search is cumbersome on a mobile device. Delivery of desired information will change user behavior and expectations.”

“Therefore, search is becoming a mature business because its future is tied to the desktop or laptop markets. Search is too inconvenient on a mobile device, if users have an alternative to just tap an application. And, today, the desktop and laptop markets are tied to the business cycle and some low-priced growth in emerging markets. It is no longer the secular growth opportunity of the 1980s and 1990s,” Travlos writes. “But mobility is.”

Travlos writes, “While Apple is not all about the iPhone, currently the iPhone is ramping up revenues and driving profitability, with the significant added benefit of the “halo effect”–bringing the Apple footprint beyond the installed Mac user base, and driving greater adoption of the Mac computers. The iPhone is driving a secular growth trend toward adoption of mobile devices and delivery of services, and changing how users receive information. At the end of the day, at least this day, Apple and Google appear to have based their futures on different strategies, and Apple is pulling ahead.”

Read more in the full article – highly recommended – here.