“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.