<<There were NOTEABLY *NO* hints in the keynote about the extent of the quarterly profit;>>
Why do people keep saying this? Were people expecting Jobs to come out and say, "We will earn exactly .75 this quarter. Wahooo!" Specific profits are things best left to conference calls, not expos (last year's MWSF not withstanding).
In the absence of specific profit figures, however, Jobs gave us more juicy profit-related tidbits than he normally does. For one, he got specific on iMac shipment--800,000. Knowing from this info that AAPL shipped 500,000+ iMacs in Q1 is VERY important in calculating an earnings estimate.
Moroever, he released pretty specific OS 8.5 sales figures--1 million retail, 1 million with machines. And of course, by doing so, he also strongly suggested the *total* Q1 unit shipment to be in the neighborhood of 1 million. This is also a very useful piece of information to know, if nothing else, that AAPL will probably show higher quarterly unit shipment.
Finally, we must all realize that Jobs has a bit of jargon-speak. When he says AAPL will report a "profit," implicit in that statement is that AAPL will report earnings that will at least meet analysts' consensus. If AAPL wasn't, Jobs would have avoided mentioning earnings at all.
Andrew |
