soup>My reasons for owning AAPL.
soup> 1) Relative to the Wintel platform, AAPL has *distinctly
soup> superior* technology in the
soup> (a) PowerPC,
Yes
soup> (b) NeXT
Eventually, when it ships.
soup> (c) MacOS
I use Win95, NT, UNIX and MacOS at work. MacOS is *very* unstable,
specially running Netscape. On an average day, the Mac freezes
about twice a day. As a comparison I estimate my mean time between
boots for Win95 as 1 month, NT (3.51) two months, UNIX (solaris,
Linux) four-six months.
soup> (d) QuickTime
Yes
soup> (e) Newton.
Yes, but the PDA market and technology is not likely to produce
any significant revenues in the next year or so.
soup> 2) APPL has sufficient financial resources to work through
soup> its restructuring.
??. After the NeXT acquistion, they have only three quarters to
start making a profit before their resources dry out.
soup> 3) Current AAPL management, while being a little clever
soup> regarding their own compensation, is putting the changes in
soup> place to allow AAPL to prosper as a value-added computer maker.
No comment.
soup> 4) AAPL has the most loyal user base in the industry - an 86%
soup> repurchase rate.
This is comparing apples and oranges (no pun intended).
A dissatisfied Dell customer buys Gateway, and in time, he might
come back and buy Gateway again. A dissatisfied Apple customer buys
Gateway and goes WinTel. He/she will very rarely switch back to
MacOS.
Admittedly, with MacClone makers things might start to change.
soup> 5) With innovations and enhancements to quality, AAPL enjoys a
soup> solid product line that people want to buy
This is just not so. Save for the last quarter, the percentage
of people wanting to buy Apple has gone down steadily for the last
two years. That is a fact.
Hopefully, the last quarter recovery on MacOS share will stand
but it is yet to be seen if it was a flash on the pan or the
taste of things to come.
soup> -- particulary knowledgeable buyers in specialty, niche
soup> markets. The slow sales of the Performa line was due to
soup> negative publicity about the company; a slow Xmas shopping
soup> season; and the expanded market share of Mac-clones. Demand
soup> for other lines remained strong. I believe new products --
soup> laptop, desktop, servers, PDA -- are/will sell well.
Which goes to show that low end Macs have been overpriced for way,
way, way too long. Once again, with MacClones things are starting to
change, but one has to wonder why it took so long for apple to
offer computers that people can afford (I bought three computers
when I was a student, and each time Apple's were out of my reach).
soup> 6) The NeXT OS. Computer Reseller did a survey where 90% of
soup> respondents said that NeXT *will* increase AAPL market share.
Agree.
soup> Will those who are bearish on AAPL do some homework to back up
soup> their opinions? Post arguments/links.
I've followed Apple very intently for the last six months. To me it seems that there are a lot more irrational "rah rah"-ism from the
pro-Apple than the against-Apple (the stock price drop alone during
these last six months bears that out).
I agree with those that say that past performance is not that
relevant specially in the light of those who are looking for
overcorrected stock prices i.e, buying opportunities.
A few years back I made 3x returns in a matter of weeks by buying
a company I *knew* to be in trouble, but not in as much trouble as
the market thought. Unfortunately it was monopoly money: simulated
stock competition :-(. |
