“Goldman Sachs said it doubled its estimate for the number of Apple Computer (AAPL) iPod shuffle portable digital music players sold in the March quarter to 1.8 million units. As a result, the broker said it is raising its estimates for the quarter to 24 cents from 22 cents a share and its fiscal year estimates to $1.12 from $1.08 a share. The broker told clients that ‘with competition unlikely to come from ‘me too’ MP3 players, it will probably take something like Sony’s PlayStation portable to pose a challenge to iPod long term,'” CBS MarketWatch reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Credit Suisse First Boston on Tuesday (see story) stated expectations for shipments of 1.5 million iPod shuffle units in addition to 4.2 million hard-drive-based iPods for a total of 5.7 million iPod units this quarter.
As we’ve stated previously regarding the Sony PlayStation Portable: PSP might be great for gamers, but the proprietary UMD format is typical Sony: introduce yet another format and complicate things unnecessarily. And, don’t forget, the PSP is about the size of a VHS video tape – it’s just physically too large to compete with iPod. These are different devices focused on different primary purposes; PSP plays games (and music secondarily) and iPod plays music (and games secondarily). Sony will probably sell a ton of these and Apple will also sell iPods to the many of the same people.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Does Sony’s new PlayStation Portable (PSP) threaten Apple’s iPod? – March 14, 2005