“Forecasting Apple’s holiday quarter sales has been more of a dark art than a science on Wall Street the past few years,” Aaron Pressman reports for Yahoo Finance. “Analysts look to everything from supply chain clues and consumer surveys to the number of Google searches mentioning iPhones, but there’s been no reliable method yet discovered.”
“This year there’s a new contender, as IBM decided to throw the mighty weight of its Watson data analytics software service at the holiday prognistication problem,” Pressman reports. “Data scientists at IBM have set Watson loose reading millions of posts on thousands of social networks, blogs and web sites ahead of Black Friday in an effort to predict the hottest gifts of this gift-giving season.”
“The big surprise so far?” Pressman reports. “The top gift by far appears to be not a cute Star Wars robot or a talking Barbie doll but the Apple Watch… UBS’s Steve Milunovich noted that interest in Apple products as seen in Google searches is high, especially in China. Brian White of Drexel Hamilton looked at surveys of consumer buying intentions for the holidays. Tablets, where Apple’s iPad is the leader, were the second most popular category and smartphones were fourth. Smartwatches were far behind, but up 50% from last year. White said Apple watch sales would be much bigger than expected.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Analyze that, Kulbinder Garcha!