“After a mention of a mysterious ‘future product transition’ on an earnings conference call, bloggers, analysts and die-hard Apple fans are focused on dissecting exactly what new products the company may have been vaguely revealing,” Ashley Phillips reports or ABC News.
“The comments came during a conference call this week involving Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer that discussed the company’s second quarter earnings,” Phillips reports. “It was during that call that Oppenheimer reportedly mentioned the ‘future product transition, which I can’t discuss today. We will deliver state-of-the-art new products that our competitors just aren’t going to be able to match,’ he continued.”
“The brief, perhaps innocuous comment appeared on several blogs the next day alongside a rumor that analysts say has been floating around for years — that Apple would debut a touchscreen laptop,” Phillips reports.
MacDailyNews Take: The brief, perhaps innocuous comment which Oppenheimer repeated at least seven different times!
Phillips continues, “Many die-hard Apple fans told ABCNews.com that they were excited by the prospect of a touch-screen anything from Mac. ‘I would buy it in a heartbeat,’ Matt Vreeland, a doctor in Pinehurst, N.C… Thom Rouse, a graphic designer based in Trenton, N.J., said he would definitely buy a Mac tablet.”
MacDailyNews Take: G.D. rumormongers!
Phillips continues, “The rumor of ‘MacBook touch’ appeared on the blog MacDailyNews, attributed to an anonymous tipster.”
MacDailyNews Take: Oh… uh, yeah. Please strike previous Take.
Phillips continues, “‘Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like, but fuller-featured Multi-Touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X,’ the tipster wrote.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The full article even includes Rob Enderle who “predicted another version of the iPhone that has a physical keyboard rather than the touch screen to further compete with Research in Motion’s Blackberry [since Apple] hasn’t made a dent in RIM’s audience [because] Research in Motion grew in the midst of iPhone’s attacks.”
In Rob’s warped world, Apple has little or no effect on anything. His POS Windows laptop that he controls with a trackpad and his POS WIndows desktop that he controls with a mouse and that GUI that he fights all day long just happens to look like an upside-down and backwards Mac by pure coincidence. And all of these uni-touch touchscreen (Multi-Touch™ is a trademark of Apple Inc.) black slab with a chrome edge “smartphones” that are popping up recently are just a random occurrence because, well, that’s what a smartphone is supposed to look like, right?
Enderle also ignores the double digit market share that Apple has already grabbed out of the smartphone market and the fact that it’s impossible to know how much more RIM could have grown without iPhone present in the market and therefore he cannot quantify the size of the dent Apple has made in RIM at all.
We can however tell you that it’s highly-probable that iPhone, in reality, has made a dent in RIM’s audience simply by applying the common sense that Rob Enderle so obviously lacks. Just one person more needs to have switched from a BlackBerry to an iPhone than vice versa in order to prove his statement false. Does anybody think more iPhone users switched to BlackBerry than the other way around? If so, the massive Enderle Group (which currently consists of Rob and his wife Mary) just might want to see your resume.
RIM et al. aren’t desperately trying (and failing) to churn out fake iPhones simply for our amusement (that’s just a side benefit).
Another dent: Needham downgrades BlackBerry-maker RIM, citing ‘explosive’ Apple iPhone 3G sales – July 16, 2008
And another: BlackBerry-maker RIM misses analysts’ profit estimates, gives disappointing forecast; shares drop 8% – June 25, 2008
And another: Needham initiates RIMM coverage at ‘hold,’ says growth unsustainable with Apple iPhone 2.0 looming – April 09, 2008
A few more dents like these and RIM will be in danger of being totaled.
If it’s anything like the mockups I’ve seen, I’ll be standing in line again.
Man, Enderle has a slant on things that is truly amazing.
It’s also possible that the iPhone brought so much attention to the smartphone segment, that it grew the whole segment so that it accelerated Blackberry sales. Instead of denting BB sales, it probably helped them. The players that got hurt were Palm, Motorola and Nokia, who couldn’t grow their smartphone share in a growing smartphone market.
Let RIM continue to think that Apple hasn’t made a dent. By the time they realize it, it will be too late to stop the wave. It may
already be too late for RIM.
The beauty is the design of the iPhone and the APP Store. As more & more apps become available, the iphone becomes more & more useful.
” . . . they were excited by the prospect of a touch-screen anything from Mac.
From Mac?
When did Apple’s product brand become a company?
Sorta like Iraq hasn’t made a dent in the United States.
As for the iPad, iNewton or iTablet or iDevice, if it’s twice the size of the iPhone, or about the footprint size of the 12″ AluPB, that I’ll replace, then I’ll be waiting in line too.
Perhaps the iPhone “hasn’t made a dent in RIM’s audience” because it caters to the discerning customer who would never have considered a smart phone before because they all sucked so bad.
Oh, wait, it’s Enderle. No point in wasting a perfectly logical hypothesis on that doucherag. Never mind.
Would this be a very small device, ala something the size of an HTC?
Somewhere between iPhone and MacBook?
Full not iPhone gimped OS X?
That you can, if you so desire, connect a keyboard and mouse to?
That has USB 2.0 and EtherNet (via USB sorta like the MacBook Air?)
well, I don’t know about a DENT but I know two of my co-workers that switched from a crackberry to an iPhone. All the guys with a Treo look very sad these days.
I tried to watch a recent episode of Cranky Geeks that had Enderle on the panel.
I couldn’t do it. All I could think of was choking the life out of that turd. Him and the rest of his group of two.
I think that the iPhone has increased RIM’s total sales by making the consumer more aware of what a “smartphone” is and consequently inducing the desire to purchase one. In other words, the iPhone is growing the smartphone market in general.
Market-share wise the Blackberry is one of the best so iPhone and BB are becoming the front-runners both increasing market share.
iPhone’s market share increase is more dramatic because it started from nothing a little more than a year ago.
Ultimately, though, the iPhone is destined to win the market share race because it is such an amazing and revolutionary device.
Enderle who?
I agree with Enderle on that one. The iPhone might have been better for RIM than Apple thus far.
RIM could never develop a product as lustworthy as the iPhone. Smartphone growth would’ve continued at a very slow pace without it. Before the iPhone, smartphone growth was reliant on “prosumers” going for more feature-filled devices like the BlackBerry Pearl, Motorola Q and Samsung BlackJack. It was slow, especially compared to the rest of the world.
The iPhone was the game changer and now there’s growth all around, enough that sales haven’t hurt RIM at all. In fact Palm is the biggest loser with both Apple and RIM eating away at their market share.
Now I’m sure the iPhone 3G at a cheaper pricepoint will be a different story by the end of the year. Once Apple turns the iPhone into a lineup of devices and hit the $99-to-free sweetspot it should hurt RIM further. As of right now, however, RIM has only benefitted from the iPhone.
Ampar, you can be so obtuse…
Mac is the name of the guy at the Apple Store in the Orange T Shirt here in Boston.
RIM has known about the iPhone for at least 19 months. What do they have out the door?…A model that only resembles the iPhone in appearance, minus the smaller screen and buttons that are there whether you want to use them or not. If I was still a shareholder, I would be asking alot of questions.
MDN, love your LG Dare ad at the bottom.
My take on Macbook Touch:
If ever that thing exist, then for it to take off, it shouldn’t just be a multi-touch enabled laptop.
This is a mistake most hardware companies like Dell have done, that Apple should avoid.
This product will have to be rethought as a whole, as a device of a totally new genre.
I mean some type of Internet & portable media device, with editing/handwritting functions.
A combo mix of productivity/media/gaming, a device on its own, an iPod like of communication.
If MobileME get up and running one day, then such a device could be awesome and unique.
I have two random thoughts after reading this article.
#1 – I would pay an awful lot of money to see Enderle and Ballmer in a sumo wrestling match.
#2 – A really hot product would be a MacBook Touch (great name BTW) with no keyboard or cover, instead the keyboard appears on the screen like the iPhone, but in standard size. Also, make it as thin as the Air. Now that baby would absolutely fly off the shelves.
iPad.
You heard it right here.
The whole market for smart phones has grown since the iPhone was released.
Even beleaguered Palm has increased their sales of smart phones in the last year. How can you take a bit out of RIM when their year over year smart phone sales have increased so dramatically? Let’s face it, with no iPhone, RIM’s smart phone sales would have been lower in the last 12 months than they are now.
Apple helped RIM sell more smart phones not less.
Company of about 1500 people, currently 250 blackberries, many also have personal iphones and I’m getting 5 e-mails a day asking when we are going to allow mobilesync. Currently awaiting final approval to send the e-mail out to the company about the approval process but when it happens I think we will get over half of those bb’s back within a week.
Bluefin: Oh, yeah. That cheesy guy.
MDN has become so biased it’s actually become rather depressing. The fact that they don’t even follow their own logic and nobody even seems to notice is even more disturbing.
MDN, you can’t call somebody out for being wrong simply because you don’t like what they’re saying or who they are. I don’t particularly like enderle either, but the fact of the matter is that if you can’t measure the damage that apple has done to RIM, you can’t say that rob is wrong. The only factual statistic that we have is how well they’ve done, and in the time that the iphone has been out, RIMs stock has gone up.
Claiming that apple is hurting RIM when RIM is doing better than ever, is exactly like saying napster hurt the recording industry when the record companies were making record profits.
You assholes are using the same logic as the RIAA.
Try to write something objectively for once.
Maybe someone oughtta order Mac to cut the cheese…