“Assuming the talk is correct, it is hard to see the device proving immediately attractive to the mass market given a price expected somewhere between $500 and $900,” Peers writes.
“Of course, it is dangerous betting against Steve Jobs. Apple could cut the device’s price,” Peers hedges.
“While it is good news that Apple is still innovating, investors shouldn’t expect any near-term bottom-line benefit from the tablet,” Peers opines. “The iPhone will remain the growth engine for the company for a while yet. Buying shares on enthusiasm about the tablet is putting the apple cart before the horse.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Again: Blind prognostication is the practice of idiots.
MDN, you forgot to iCal.
This ridiculous statement is to good not to bring up in a year when Apple sells 2M in next year’s 4Q.
Ridiculous. Apple stock prices have NEVER moved with “bottom line benefits.” It’s an entirely emotional and/or manipulated stock. It’s like a horse, not a train – its mood matters more than how much fuel you think there is in it.
Tablet, what Tablet? Anyone seen one of these Tablets?
“Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it,”
Actually people weren’t that excited about those tablets. In fact they got bored waiting for Moses and started a wild party involving orgies and worshiping a golden cow. (Two separate activities.) The real question is were these guys worshiping the cow because they were vegans or meat eaters?
Of course Moses was so pissed off by this he up and smashed his tablet models… twice. So no, the original Tablets (oTablets?) were not the source of excitement Martin Peers perceives.
If you really are an investor, your horizon is not near-term anyways.
Near term? Probaly not,
but apple is never concerned with near term, what’s that saying? Apple skates to where the puck will be, not where’s it at
Yes! I would not base my Apple stock activity based on 2009 end of year iTablet sales ( the only real near-term financial milestone this week). This anal-ist is brilliant!
Just my $0.02
no near term bottom line benefit? please. a successful tablet launch will basically consolidate Apple’s iTunes / iDevice ecosystem and set it as the gold standard.
this will become evident immediately, as developers rush to submit apps for this device
i am sure that app developers will be more easily able to write their apps and have them scale to any iDevice screen format than their Android counterparts, another key facet in Apple’s vision
dd
I’m becoming concerned that there’s a pandemic of stupidity emerging…
Peer’s not really going out on limb is he? And making comparisons between an Apple tablet and the Ten Commandments is tasteless and unoriginal, which probably pleases Murdoch to no end. Chuckle, chuckle, hardee-har-har.
Discussing investor strategies about an abstract product is premature even for the WSJ.
Besides, cautionary advice over price cuts for a yet-to-be-announced product is a lazy, cheap shot at Apple.
Rather than taking a leap of faith and extolling the virtues of a product that could take off like a rocket behind a well-founded and proven platform like the App Store, the Developers, and Mobile Me, this maroon is telling Wall Street to sit on its hands, which is the Street’s adaptation of genuflection.
Hmmm perhaps its going to be called iMoses.
@AAPLOwner:
“Analysts” don’t aim predictions at small investors, they aim them at institutions.
Additionally, “analysts” are only, ONLY, O-N-L-Y interested in the short term. Any regular-type small investor that goes by what “analysts” say will absolutely have their ass handed to them more often than not.
aapl has already been boosted by all these prophesiers.
These ideas are offered as much to manipulate prices as to predict them.
Ever since MAC announced their vaporware toy I-Tablet MAC fangirls have had a field day with this wannabe Acer TravelMate C301 XCi killer. I have news for you MAC cultists: nothing competes with the Acer TravelMate C301 XCi running Windows for tablet computers.
Your potential. Our passion.™
If Apple builds a tablet computer with a price ($700-$900?) and software capability (iPhone & Mac apps?) designed to tap into the mainstream PC notebook market, the sky is the limit.
Both Apple and Microsoft have spent hundreds of millions of marketing dollars telling the public that Apple’s stuff is the best “if you can afford it”.
If there’s suddenly a mobile computer from Apple that most people “can afford” (is in line with the price of a mid-range junk PC notebook) and just happens to be the coolest new thing on the market, Apple could conceivably take a huge chunk out of the PC notebook market.
Very few of Apple’s new products this past decade have had a “near-term bottom-line benefit”. Most have spent a year – or more – becoming embedded before jumping up and showing a surprising amount of profit behind them. Like the iTunes Music Store or the Apple Stores – neither of which was predicted to <u>directly</u> earn significant sums on their own but which currently are doing quite well, thank you.
Of course, any new HARDWARE product will be expected to haul its own weight, and THEN some, from the get-go. Because Apple is a HARDWARE company. If there really is a “tablet”, it could be derived either from the Mac or the iPhone – both areas where Apple has good and growing niches already. Yeah, niches. Anything less than 50% is a niche. Deal with it.
If this level of intelligence is typical of Wall Street “master-minds”, no wonder the system falls apart regularly.
A logical house of cards.
The funniest line was about Steve cutting the price. He hasn’t named it yet, let alone priced it.
Just wait for the iLaunch. Then we will see.
@ Hm…
Stupidity – it’s a renewable resource.
ZT … beautiful! Well, except that you inserted a space between the 301 and the XCi … understandable, I guess. Anyway … not precisely a “tablet”, it has a 14″ screen (my MacBook has a 13.3″ screen), and a full keyboard on the section housing the 1.5 GHz Pentium (my MacBook has a 2.26 GHz Core Duo), and it WEIGHS IN AT 6.2 pounds ! ! !
And, yeah, this is likely to be the model any “tablet” from Apple will be compared with. Half a GB of RAM (to my initial 2 GB) and a 40 GB HD (to my 250 GB) … and this will be the price comparison! We can all laugh at them, if and when.
> investors shouldn’t expect any near-term bottom-line benefit
Investing is about the long-term, not the “near-term,” or at least it should be. Apple already has great near-term prospects, even without any new “tablet” product.
It’s great that these writers act like experts for a product that has yet to be released.
“Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups”
Apple’s first quarter in fiscal 2010 ends to-morrow, and this should be the first quarter in which Apple ceases to exclude 7/8ths of the sales and income from its financial statements because the deferred accounting for the phone and the touch ended as and from October 1. This has nothing to do with the tablet. As well, the traffic at the Apple Stores in the iPhone section is truly astounding; hence the sales for the quarter should be outstanding, and not just for the touch and the phone. Ceteris paribus, the draw-down of the deferred asset account from prior sales should add another chunk of income to Q1FY10. It’s nice for Peers to warn about buying Apple stock, but what exactly has he to say about deferred asset accounting and Apple’s changing its accounting policy for FY 2010? He’s probably not up on his accounting. One wonders who is doing the hiring at the WSJ.
@hairy
you do realize the WSJ has changed hands, don’t you? It has now become the faux news for for the liberal ultra-right; liberal about OPM.