Steve Jobs and his greatest invention, the iPhone - Wikipedia  It was an active day in Apple world on Tuesday, with analyst upgrades, market share reports, and a tear down of the new CDMA iPhone that rattled the chip world.  Apple’s iPhone continues to move the market, as the company co-founded by Steve Jobs marches on, closing the market cap gap with the world’s largest company, Exxon Mobil. A website advocating gadget self repair, iFixit, published its “tear down” of the CDMA iPhone4, designed to run on a Verizon network. As the internal components came to light, the markets automatically picked winners and losers in the chip world.  Avago, found to make one of the chips on the iPhone’s logic board, saw its stock hit an all-time high of $31.95 on the news, attesting to the power of Apple, not only on consumers, but on investors as well. A second winner was Qualcomm, already known to be used by Apple on the iPhone. Qualcomm produces “wireless baseband chip that allows the iPhone to work on Verizon’s CDMA and EVDO network” according to TheStreet.com. Thus, shares in Qualcomm hit pre-Lehman values, at $55.92by 1:39 PM.  The “teardown” comes a few days ahead of the official release of Verizon’s CDMA iPhone on February 10. Canaccord Genuity took the situation as an opportunity to raise its target price from $432 to $460 citing “strong sell-through trends for the iPad and the iPhone.” On the mobile side, Canaccord analysts raised their sales estimate for the iPhone from 72.9 million to 74.8 million previously on strong demand for the CDMA iPhone. In terms of tablets, increased competition from Android-fueled devices shouldn’t derail sales growth in iPads, leading to an increased estimate of 34 million units from the firm.  “Our $460 valuation is based on shares trading at 18x our F2012 pro-forma EPS estimate,” read the note. Canaccord raised all its estimates for Apple, from sales (expected at $100.3 billion for F2011) to EPS (now forecasted at $22.92 for F2011). (Read Bullish On Gold All The Way To $1,600).  The constant upgrades for Apple make sense in the context that demand has been voracious for its products. (Steve Jobs ranks 42 in our Forbes 400 list). Despite fears about the fate of the company without Steve Jobs, who took a medical leave of absence to concentrate on his health in January, Apple products continue to dominate the markets. A report from comScore on 2010 fourth quarter mobile markets showed Apple sitting on the smartphone podium, along with Research In Motion and Google.  Smartphone usage grew 60% to 63.2 million compared to the fourth quarter of 2009, according to comScore. The top performer in the all-important “operating system” segment for the quarter was Google’s Android, which gained 7.3% of market share to outpace Apple’s iOS as number two in the rankings. With 24.8% market share, Google is second to Research In Motion and its BlackBerry phones, which held 31.6% of the market, 5.7% less on a sequential basis. Apple’s market share remained steady, at 25%, up 0.7% from the previous quarter, even though it got relegated to the bronze position.  In afternoon trading in New York, shares in Apple were up 0.8% to $354.75 by 1:39 PM.
Apple's iPhone continues to rattle markets, as an inside view of the components on the new CDMA version for Verizon shakes the chip market.