financial/investor

10/13/2005, 12:40pm, EDT

Thursday, October 13th

Audacity sets Apple apart

Apple CEO Steve Jobs' bold decision to nix the iPod mini in favor of the Nano has been dubbed "audacious" by some, but others looking to the future believe that this kind of move is exactly what sets Apple apart. Apple introduced iPod mini just 19 months before revealing the Nano, and sales showed no signs of slowing down when the new product made its debut on September 7th, according to a report from BusinessWeek online. The 10-percent drop in Apple's stock following the announcement of its fourth-quarter results, despite the fact that iPod sales were up 220-percent from the previous year, seemed to suggest that Jobs' move to discontinue the Mini was the wrong one. Despite this, however, Jobs' decision to bet big in research and development -- creating products designed to keep customers excited -- as well as focusing Apple's marketing on a few carefully-designed products rather than creating dozens of forgettable ones as most large tech companies do, is the right choice for Apple, according to the report.


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The Wrong Move???
0
10/13, 2:11pm, EDT
What the hell -- they are equating the drop in stock price (for 24 hours, the stock's recovered more than nicely now), to Job's 'wrong' decision to drop the mini in favor of the nano?

The mini was selling well - the nano is selling PHENOMENALLY well. This is so typical for these stock gambling amateurs, and analysts -- as always, I am loath to remotely trust the opinion of a person working for the equivalent of minimum wage, in a cublicle, telling people with real money how to invest it. If they were any good, they wouldn't work in a cubicle, after all.

Anyway, both the recovery of the stock price, as well as the nano's sales prove them wrong. Furthermore, I predict that the video sales segemnt of the iTunes store will quickly take off, as more networks and content providers jump on board.

ZinkDifferent
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Dead On
0
10/13, 2:23pm, EDT
Who writes these articles anyway? What the heck does replacing the iPod mini with the nano have to do with the stock drop? You should get a clue first and then write an article, not the opposite.
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cubes
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10/13, 2:29pm, EDT
Not all ini power have offices. No one at Intel, for example, has an office. Their CEO has Cube, like everyone else. Not all in Cubes are worthless.
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White noise
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10/13, 2:51pm, EDT
Why listen to people that "make predictions" Listen, understand, observe" for yourself. Listen to no "expert" If the experts were right, Apple would have been DOA years ago. I really don't think people understand that Jobs listens to his gut. How a product reacts with his senses and feeling. I would say that 95% of the time his emotions give the right indication on what people will feel. A computer is a computer. An operating system is an operating system. Apple excels at touching the inner feeling within someone that most companies don't understand. Anyone can out out stuff. Apple puts out stuff that hits the inner core. The nano hits the inner core cool factor. Why wait till the mini is on its last gasping breath before replacing it. If the nano exceeds current mini sales, isn't it worth it? Why sell say 200,000 minis in a month when the nano would sell say 300,000 units.
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Os is an Os
0
10/13, 4:46pm, EDT
Problem is that for most people it is much like that - funny how they know the speed of the CPU and memory size is important, but no understanding of what an OS is, or how it affects the performance they get from their machine. But then I guess most of us know the engine size in our cars but nothing about the gearbox and transmission.

And how confusing was OS/2 Release 2 in Spanish?
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DOA
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10/13, 5:23pm, EDT
Apple was nearly dead because it was run by MBAs who followed the conventional wisdom and the market herd.
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dump users as well ?
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10/13, 6:11pm, EDT
what about all the people who bought an iPod Mini rather than, say, a Zen. What happens to their support, their firmware upgrades, their chances of getting a neat accessory ? I bought my 60GB non-photo iPod about a week before the rounds of v2 Photo announcments... and watched the price (and thus and eBay resale value) drop. Wonder how people who bought a Mini the day before the announcement feel now....
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10% drop in stock?? Huh?
0
10/13, 6:29pm, EDT
What the heck is this writer talking about? Even though the stock dropped 10% it was all in afterhours trading. During the next official trading session the stock price only closed lower 2% from the end of the previous day. That's nothing. And, btw, today the stock closed 9% higher and is now ABOVE Tuesdays levels.
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re: dump users as well..
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10/13, 6:36pm, EDT
"what about all the people who bought an iPod Mini rather than, say, a Zen. What happens to their support, their firmware upgrades, their chances of getting a neat accessory ? I bought my 60GB non-photo iPod about a week before the rounds of v2 Photo announcements... and watched the price (and thus and eBay resale value) drop. Wonder how people who bought a Mini the day before the announcement feel now...."

An mp3 player is an mp3 player. You got what you wanted and you use it to play music and you'll continue to use it to play music. Apple will support it with firmware upgrades until it decides there's no reason to anymore. So what? You don't need a firmware upgrade to keep using it. Accessory makers will keep making products for it until they decide there's no more market there. So what? It only cost you a couple hundred dollars. Do you expect it to last you a lifetime? No. That's the whole point. It will last you a few years and then you'll buy a newer model. It's not like buying a computer. It's just an mp3 player.
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I couldn't care less ...
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10/13, 7:31pm, EDT
... about the stock price, BUT even if Apple remains cutting edge, the iPod Mini was not a "forgettable" product in a cluttered product line. It was a very popular device with its own attraction in a line of a few other great devices with different markets to attract.
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