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

To: David Kuspa who wrote (8062)	1/29/1998 6:48:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 213173

David; Is there a benchmark that measures 1. (data processed)/$1000?, or 2.(number of programs useable)/$1000 These are the measures that the consumer uses for general purpose computing, and that is the only place the Apple market can expand. The niches that Apple dominates, mainly assorted visual arts, graphic arts and audio programs are eroding faster than the basic market is growing, and so there can be no fast growth there, only a slowing of the slide, and that is unlikely. It is true that the fastest Apples beat the fastest pentium IIs, but how long will that continue as Motorola has slowed is development work in that area, and there are no others carrying the ball(as good as Motorola was). The Pentium II will be at 400-500 Mhz this years and there are faster ones in the pipeline that will go to 1000 Mhz by 2000, +,-. Apple mus make a 'sea change', and extract all the costs from their product by minimizing funny parts. An ideal way would be to use a Pentium II or pentium style power supply and keyboard(with a few different keycaps for Apple keys, same with the mouse, same with a case, and memory, and the ability to use PCI cards and bus etc, but still retain the APple ease of use and connectivity. There is no real reason that the case and power supply, mouse, and keyboard should costs more than $60-70 for good quality stuff in total(10,000 lot price), and very cheap stuff could be $40-45 in total. (for example, cheap PC mice are $4, cheap keyboards are $7, cheap cases are $12 and cheap power supplies are $18) (Good mice are $10, good keyboards are $18, good cases are $20 and good power supplies are around $20-25.) Sure Apple stuff is a bit different, but not so much that the makers cannot do this easily. The mother board should cost around $135(SCSI) or $100 (EIDE) plus the CPU and the memory. (cheap PC motherboards are $65 and good ones are $100, and those with SCSI are around $135. There are premium brands as well) We all know what PC cpus cost and memory as well. Apple CPUs can hit those price points and the same memory can be used. It might help to use cheaper EIDE hard drives, as SCSI costs a lot more than EIDE. So Apple can get into this fray if it wants to. If it chooses not to enter the fray, then it is doomed to slowly peter away as the numbers shrink inexorably due to them not meeting the performance per $$ benchmark. The consumer votes with the wallet, and you cannot force them to buy. You can only convince them with bottom line logic. Forget the Apple being better argument, it has bought nothing over the past 8 years but decline. Forget the easier networking argument, that has also bought nothing over the past 8 years but decline. What arguments are left? It is no good to gather in singing circles, worshipping the great god jobs, and waiting for a miracle. There may well be lower sales next quarter, but more profits as the lean/mean effect takes it course. This will free up profits to use in the right way. Will Apple use them the right way? With Jobs using his own head, no way. If he gets sound advice it might work. The shares that bought Power can be sold as offshore shorts(where you need not conform to SEC rules) any time, as long as the seller leaves the money in the account, and keeps that balance in line with Apple share price. He can then wait for the written trade restriction on the stock(legend) to expire and then use them to cover his short position. That amount of stock sold over time is negligible. Bill