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

To: LauA who wrote (24685)	5/9/1999 2:16:00 PM
From: WebDrone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

LauA- I don't find your point compelling. Sorry, but the trend shows that despite the availability of ultacheap winclone boxes, iMac sales are very very strong and Apple's margins remain intact. Point being, Apple's strategy is working, and Compaq's is not. The money is not at the low, low end. The availability of "obsolete" (Obsolete? Ha! My original iMac is still more machine than I need, and me a web page designer.) imacs allows the price on old inventory iMacs to dip below $1k. Where I advise everyone I know to buy an iMac, because it is a VALUE! Perhaps Soup knows about the retail deals. Bottom line, Apple is not following a low cost, beige box, windows sales model. It has been working for quite some time, and shows no sign of failure yet. Wallstreet is only now starting to believe it, since the evidence is becoming impossible to ignore. Web You want a cheap box? Buy the eMachine. If you know what you are doing, you can get it working. It will be obsolete in 2 years. I expect my iMac will be going strong in 3 years, and it is already a year old.

To: LauA who wrote (24685)	5/9/1999 7:17:00 PM
From: Marc Newman	Respond to of 213177

I don't know about everyone else, but eMachines is reminding me of PowerComputing. You know, fastest growing hardware company ever, great price performance, hitting the bigger slower competitors where they can't compete as well. And then bam, they hit a wall and start losing money. Power was losing money before Jobs bought them out, after making money the previous year or two. They just couldn't scale their business after the easy money was made. And eMachines is probably making no money now either, depending on ISP bundling deals for a lot of its gross profit margin. What happens if Intel and AMD decide to raise low-end prices to protect margins? What if Asia recovers and component prices stop falling as fast as they have been? What if the other competitors in the sub $600 box segment start competing better or new ones show up? Let's put it this way, I wouldn't want to invest in the eMachines IPO and hold the stock for a year. This is not to say that it does Apple any good to have to compete with $599 boxes. My point is just that eMachines is flavor of the year. Apple is doing great and I think the 2.2 million guesstimate that was floating around for iMac annual sales is verrry reasonable. I'm not so sure we can break past $50 and hold it either, especially with options expiration coming up. As I think I said on the MF thread, the P1 is more damaging to the new PB rollout than the iMac was to the then puny 6500 sales last year. Apple would damage the quarter by rolling out the P1 now. Maybe a mid-June special event and then available by late July? Shop demo models to education as soon as possible though so they can make plans. Btw, I think jumping on a new poster for his bullishness is a bit much, as is accusing David Stern of being short. And "Save Our Streams?" I love it! Marc PS--Oh, LauA, Apple generally doesn't price protect unless it is getting close to a new rollout. I don't think the rev B (266 mhz) iMacs had any price protection at all. And they pretty much sold out, as did the G3 desktops in December. Apple is now a master at managing inventory. They do it better than any non-direct boxmaker.