“Needham upgraded shares of Apple on Wednesday, citing strong iPod sales and a potential PowerMac rebound,” reports Meredith Derby for TheStreet.com. “Analyst Charles R. Wolf upgraded the company’s shares to buy from hold, set a $23 price target and increased his full-year 2003 and 2004 earnings estimates.”
“iPod sales have increased unexpectedly since late April after the launch of the iTunes Music Store and the availability of new iPods, Wolf said. He added, ‘Sales of the iPod should receive an additional boost when Apple ports its award-winning iTunes jukebox software, which powers the iPod, to the Windows platform later this year,'” Derby reports.
Derby writes, “Regarding the company’s PowerMac computer line, Wolf expects sales could rebound in the first quarter of 2004. He said he expects a narrowing of the gigahertz gap between PowerMac and Windows machines when Apple unveils its new PowerMacs that run on IBM’s 970 processor family in late June. He added that the graphics application Quark Express was released for Mac OS X last week, and said demand for the PowerMac could possibly increase among graphics professionals. ‘Apple is abandoning its long-standing strategy of confining its award-winning software to the Mac platform,’ said Wolf.”
Shares of Apple (AAPL) were up .75 in midday trading at $18.94.
Full article here.
They can ‘expect a narrowing of the gigahertz gap between PowerMac and Windows machines’ all they want, but the fact will remain that PPC 970’s will be under 2GHz vs 3.2+ GHz Pentiums.
Even though this has no meaning, and the 64-bit PPC 970 is likely to blow the doors off the 32-bit P4, Joe Sixpack will still shop purely by number. 3.2GHz is bigger than 1.xGHz every time.
I predict doom. Unless even the Windows rags cannot figure out a way to rig the benchmark tests and the PPC 970 is so obviously faster that the GHz Myth finally implodes and becomes known and understood all the way down to Joe Sixpack’s level of understanding.
Good luck, Apple.
Frankly I’m not very happy about this. Where is he getting his info from regarding the release date for the 970? So far it’s just all unconfirmed rumors, which means that if next Monday comes around and there is no 970 announcement, their stock is going to take a nosedive, just because this bozo can’t tell the difference between fact and rumor.
I understand your skepticism on this but you guys have to realize that Apple needs this good pub! From everything we’ve heard, whether it be rumor, hearsay or actual reports, the 970’s will be out sooner rather than later.
The analyst is correct with his assessment of the iPod and the iTMS. Once it goes to Windows you are going to see people really start to look Apples way. MS has no major OS plans until 2005 supposedly. This is the time for Apple to strike and their timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The issue for Apple is how is their marketing department going to capitalize on this opportunity? That’s the big question.
Apple was to have died off, what, 24 times now. This company is a major survivor and soon will be a major player again.
Apple already is a major player by the mere fact MS continually tries to imitate them on the software side and evryone tries to imitate them on the aesthetics of their hardware (the original iMac single-handedly got everyone and their brother to build their products with translucent cases).
We see unending imitations of everything Apple, and this is good for all computer users. Apple is the high-end computing experience, and is more often than not ahead of it’s time with it’s contributions to the technological world: the desktop computer, PDA, digicams… on and on and on.