We'll see. After a long hiatus, I am back in AAPL long. I personally believe the Mac OS X transition will be fraught with peril, but I don't believe that it will ship before Q3 (Calendar Q2).
I am anxious to see the real earnings report. The pre-announcement was incredibly vague and alluded to everything, which is why Wall Street reacted so negatively. Intrinsically, the street has no long term faith in AAPL, so when anything disappoints, the worst is assumed.
I am worried, however, about AAPL morale and execution through this stock fiasco.
I'd have to check Eric's latest numbers to see how important it is to the next quarter that the PowerBook has slipped again. Intrinsically, I can't tell yet what the damage with the G4 Cube really is: if the box has high margins, they have room to cut the price. But there may not be enough volume on it to get the price down.
If July really is the nadir, that would make sense given the long stall for upgrading the iMacs, the uncertainty around the new machine, and uncertainty about new PowerBooks.
The PowerPC G4 fiasco continues to roll on, and we all knew that it would be tough. At this point, though, we are not hearing what we need to hear:
We will have a 1.0+ Ghz PowerPC G4 by Summer 2001.
The bad news about tumult in the PC market is that when Intel and Dell start worrying about growth and volume, they start making huge strides in speed and price/performance.
All that being said, $22/share easily prices all that risk in and more, in my opinion. I do worry, though, that negative publicity could turn into a nasty spiral turning customers away this holiday season. Ideally, Apple will have some wonderful way to create positive spin sometime this quarter... |
