Apple posts

By Morgan Housel
The Motley Fool

In the investing world, knowing what not to buy may be equally as important as knowing what to buy.

After around 70 years of investing, Warren Buffett has undoubtedly emerged as one of the great investors all of time, but also one of the pickiest. Unlike some money managers that jump in and out of investments at breakneck speeds, Buffett's portfolio at Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A ) (NYSE: BRK-B ) continues to exemplify the notion of buy and hold... forever.

Most Buffett fans, us here at the Fool included, love to play the game of trying to predict Buffett's next target for a big acquisition or investment. However, if we look at some companies that the Oracle of Omaha wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, there may be some lessons learned.

1. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL ) If Buffett were to invest in Apple, such an investment would likely shatter the record for most tweets per second on Twitter and cause a CNBC commentator to simply explode. But rest assured, I do not believe Warren Buffett will make an investment in Apple. Despite the company's enormous pile of cash and track record of generating fat margins, Buffett views companies with a time horizon that can span well beyond 20 years. Although the iPhone-maker commands the best margins in the industry today, Buffett realizes the likelihood that the technology hardware landscape will change over the next several years is huge compared to a shift in the landscape of say, banking.

2. Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX ) One of the things Warren Buffett looks for in a company is a strong and visionary leader. And Netflix has that in CEO Reed Hastings. However, Buffett also values a company with a significant "competitive moat" and that spits off tons of cash. Netflix does not have that. Despite being the first mover in the space, and its recent effort to create original content, prices for outside content will continue to rise as more companies enter the streaming space. Although Netflix stopped reporting its "churn" rate, most estimate that this rate is fairly low -- as competition emerges, there's not much that will keep customers from fleeing to a different service.

As the smartphone market slows, tablets are becoming an increasingly popular way of consuming mobile data, according to the latest report by mobile advertising network Jumptap.

The company found that tablets accounted for 18% of all mobile traffic on its advertising network, which covers 134 million mobile customers in the US and 206 million worldwide, in 2012, which was a sharp increase from 7% in 2011. Of course, smartphones still represented a dominant 78% of the network's traffic, but the company projects that tablets will make up close to one-third of all traffic by the end of this year.

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By Sterling Wong
Minyanville

Last summer, during a protracted legal battle with bitter rival Samsung (PINK:SSNLF), the world learned a lot about how Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has been able to enjoy free publicity over the years, thanks to carefully placed product placements in Hollywood movies.

According to testimony by Phil Schiller, Apple's global chief of marketing, the Cupertino, California-based company never pays for its products to be used by Hollywood stars in movies and television, but it does "have a person who helps provide products to people that want to do that."

"Apple won't pay to have their products featured, but they are more than willing to hand out an endless amount of computers, iPads, and iPhones," elaborated Gavin Polone, producer of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, in a conversation with Daily Tech. "It's kind of a graft situation."

Whoever Apple hired to promote its merchandise for product placement usage must have received large bonuses because Apple has all but invaded the big screen in the past decade. According to a study by Brandchannel, Apple-branded products showed up in over one-third of all US box office-topping films between 2001 and 2011, which was more than what McDonald's (NYSE:MCD), Pepsi (NYSE:PEP), and Sony VAIO (NYSE:SNE) could muster up. In 2011's Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Apple products got more than five minutes of screen time, which marketing firm Front Row Analytics calculated was worth more than $23 million.

The free publicity Apple enjoys helps the company keep advertising costs down. Apple spends just $1 billion per year on advertising, much less than Samsung ($2.6 billion) or Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) ($1.6 billion). It also allows the company to reap the intangible benefits of being associated with the glamorous Hollywood film industry.

By Evan Niu, CFA
The Motley Fool

Stop me if you've heard this one before: the PC is dead. This has been a recurring debate in the tech world for years. Plenty of digital ink has been spilled right here on Fool.com trying to prove and disprove that notion. Investors would be surprised at how much has actually happened over the past three to four years.

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has proclaimed that we're now entering the "Post-PC" era, but Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) thinks it's more like "PC-Plus." I'll show you one simple chart that proves the PC is dead.

Three for the price of one!
First, I have a little confession to make. I've misled you a tiny bit; there's actually more than one chart for us to go through, but don't worry, we'll get to it. I've compiled four years of quarterly historical data from IDC on the smartphone, tablet, and PC markets and created a handful of charts to make my case.

These are worldwide PC unit shipments over the past four years:

By Josh Wolonick
Minyanville

The iPhone is sexy. As a non-iPhone user, I've found its sleek and simple design compelling ever since my first lucky friend got one. The feel of it in my hand, on my ear, as I make a call from my girlfriend's iPhone after my BlackBerry has died. The iPad is just as beautiful a device, with its crystal-clear display and oh-so-responsive touch. When it came out, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) marketed it as a "Magical and Revolutionary Device at an Unbelievable Price" (seriously, they called it magical). And going way back, there's the iPod, the mp3 player that changed the game and, after the burst of brilliance that was Apple's iMacs, cemented Apple's comeback and eventual rise to one of the world's most valuable companies.

The problem is that these devices are expensive, and for a recent college graduate/writer/actor like myself, the prices are restrictive. The fact is that lots of people want iPhones and iPads, but not everyone can have one...yet (see my story from last week about people in China buying fake iPhone signatures for a popular IM service).

Thanks to Apple being the vanguard for sexy smartphones and tablets, other companies have followed suit, creating products that allow those of us with limited budgets to follow the trends whilst daydreaming about the "magical" original.

Here are a few quality budget options to let you keep up with Apple:

By Carol Kopp
Minyanville.com

Why wear out shoe leather walking the endless and crowded corridors of the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where 1.87 million square feet of space will be devoted to 3,000 exhibitors from around the world? Especially since there have been at least cryptic news leaks about some of the biggest announcements expected at the show, which runs all next week.

Here's the word so far:

By Jonah Loeb
Minyanville


For those of us who like parties, champagne, and general bonhomie, the turn of a new year is a great occasion to have fun with friends. For those of us who like pushing buttons and having things go "beep" at us, there's a different reason to get excited after the ball drops: the Consumer Electronics Show is on its way.

When the CES kicks off in Las Vegas next week, some of the world's hottest tech companies will be hoping to wow attendees and press alike with their biggest, boldest, and most far-out innovations. Some of them may look like things that Q gives to James Bond, but some of them may end up changing the world. Here's what to expect from the big guns at the 2013 CES.

By Josh Wolonick
Minyanville

If 2012 was the year that disc drives and compact discs became obsolete, the ubiquity of GPS services on smartphones made stand-alone GPS devices unnecessary, and small-screened smartphones were widely replaced by the large-screened Samsung Galaxy and slightly taller Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone 5, what can we expect from 2013?

The evolution of technology proceeds ferociously fast, and this past year was no exception. With rumors on the Internet of Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) wearable eyeglasses, known now as Glass, and more recently, of an iWatch from Apple, the companies may be preparing wearable computer technology in anticipation of the death of the smartphone as we know it.