From my standpoint, everything I see points towards a record breaking holiday season for Apple. The most important thing for me is that record breaking revenues should cross all categories of Apple products. The only product that may not have participated is the intel pro mac line but they may have gotten a boost from seeing the beta for Adobe's cs3.
Every time I was in an Apple store it was busy. When I went to compusa the Apple section was busy as well. Many stores were out of iPods when I was looking. I upgraded 2 computers this quarter and will probably upgrade at least 1 more in the upcoming year. I think many Apple users are in the same boat as I am and were waiting for the intel line to mature a bit before stepping in and upgrading. I would have waited till next year but had to upgrade at this time several of my computers. I will probably upgrade to leopard, especially if the iChat feature about leaving video messages for people is included in the feature set. That alone would be worth the price of the upgrade to me.
Reading many of the responses to Apple related stories on the web showed that there seemed to be a record number of claims of former windows users buying a new intel mac this quarter, with either boot camp or parallels being the main reason for this. What is interesting is that many also claim that after switching, they find that they really don't need the windows side any more. There are many articles in the windows press praising Apple products. With the new ad line that Apple has been pushing, it seems to me that it is having a significant effect.
I think Apple will sell at least 16 million iPods this quarter but it could go as high as 17 or 18 million with the level of interest that I have seen. I think there is an outside chance of 20 million but this is probably just wishful thinking on my part. I think Apple will do 2 million cpu's this quarter and and outside chance that they will do more. I think that potentially points towards close to 7 billion in revenue this quarter. IF these predictions come to pass, then I think the share price is easily 90-100 dollars per share. To put it in the proper perspective, Apple is doing more in this quarter than they were doing in a whole year just a couple of years back. That is a big turnaround and has been somewhat reflected in the share price but I think there is still room to the upside.
Taking a look at the options picture, to me it looks like there is still a nice premium on Apple calls that would suggest that most feel that Apple will be heading up in the near future, either with macworld announcements and or with the latest quarterly report. We should also be hearing what happens by the end of this week what the latest filing for Apple should be related to the options problems that they have had. If you feel that the report is going to be much ado about nothing, then it might be time to buy some options before the end of the year. It might also be time to buy before mwsf or the quarterly cc depending on what is happening with the stock.
I think there has been much talk about future unnannounced products but because of all the uncertainty, it is difficult to get a good read on things. It seems pretty certain that Apple needs to spread the iPod line into the phone line but the whys and wherefores are uncertain. If Apple can use its clout to help with phone sales(and I think things here may be more robust overseas than here), with the iTV, if successful, may add a half a buck to a buck a year in earnings. That would definitely make the share price right now look pretty cheap.
One product which I don't think we will see this year but maybe in the next 2-3 years is a standalone OS X for Intel product for sales to Windows users. I think the timing of this, if we see it, is when we see a plateau of Apple hardware sales. At that time, I think we might see such a product but not before. No sense in losing hardware sales because of this.
Over the weekend, there has been talk of new security flaws in Vista and Word. Not only that, but there has been talk of actual exploits in the wild as opposed to what has happened with Apple flaws. This could also have a positive affect for Apple on people's cpu buying decisions.
As to the content on the board, I don't participate as much as before because of the nuisance factor. You can have people on ignore but when you have everybody responding, the noise to usefullness ratio of posts becomes an issue. If recommended posts are an issue, everybody has it in their power to reward the on topic, credible informative posts and not recommend the useless posts of personal attack. I find that the most recommended posts are the ones that contain personal attacks of one sort or another. JMO though.
Everybody have a happy and a healthy new year.
Neal |
