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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Richard Habib who wrote (27816)	3/8/2000 11:45:00 PM
From: Dr. Id	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213182

Regarding Willamette, I wouldn't be shocked if by Dec its closer to 1.4 Ghz. With the large on chip caches as well as the fact that it is supposedly a far better core than x86 its supposed to be a real screamer. At the very least I think it will substantially close if not eliminate the performance gap with G4 on a Mhz to Mhz basis. Still, Intel expects it to be a high end machine and only plan on 100ks units in 2000. Rich Rich, I know that Willamette will utilize Rambus technology. Do you think that there is a possibility of Apple utilizing Rambus? Would that make a difference for Apple in maintaining a performance gap? Jeff

To: Richard Habib who wrote (27816)	3/9/2000 7:56:00 AM
From: Adam Nash	Respond to of 213182

Adam, you would think that the 1 Ghz machines would begin to impact Apple, at the very least in mindshare. On the other hand Fred stated he saw top line and unit growth in the 30% range which frankly surprised me. I still don't feel comfortable being back in the stock here, one reason being the accelerating gap in perceived performance. On the other hand I think Fred is a straight shooter and so I wouldn't bet against Apple here. That's what I was alluding to saying that the bread and butter of Apple is the iMac/iBook, so this has little short term effect. The reality is that currently the 400 and 450Mhz are competing with 400-500Mhz Celeron chips, so they are just faster. The trick is the second half of the year, when the low end market has moved to 7-800Mhz parts. Apple can't ship equivalent G4s on the low end - that will be their high end. So I think they keep bumping the G3 with IBM: 500, 600, 700Mhz. On the high end, I think they try to pull of a "1Ghz equivalent" by shipping two 500-Mhz G4s in a box. This buys them time. Shifting architectures means recompiling all software, or taking an emulation hit. Transmeta may have finally hit the holy grail of emulation, but I will wait to see actual performance (remember the PowerPC 615?) If Apple really wanted to shift hardware architectures, they would have to notify developers at least 12 months in advance. So, we know it won't happen in 2000. The obvious move would be to IA-64, but that may be a long time coming. I personally think Apple gets to work right away on a PowerPC emulator for x86. Mixed Mode Manager already supports up to 255 code types. They are ditching 68k support anyway.