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OK, OK, maybe that's not exactly how thing went down — but I'm going to pretend it did. Earlier this week I wrote about how Apple will be bigger than Google because of the innovative money-making platform that is the iPhone. But it's not just the business model that has Wall Street analysts excited — it's Apple's innovative accounting (and I don't mean stock-options backdating).

The issue is the way Apple claims revenue from the iPhone hardware sales and AT&T kickbacks service-fee share. Apple is booking all this revenue, not immediately, but over two years after the sale of an iPhone. That means that right now, Apple is only claiming a small chunk of the 1.2 million iPhones its sold on its bottom line at present — and future sales, similarly, will stretch on for years. Because of this, analysts have been looking at Apple's cash flow instead, and jacking up price estimates on AAPL. Apparently one marks $600 as his price target. Even I think that's a little nuts. More plausible? $300 a share — which would give Apple a $260 billion market cap. For those keeping score at home, that's a fair bit above Google. (Photo by Sarah Baker)