financial/investor
03/13/2006, 9:50am, EST
Monday, March 13th
MacBook Pro demand drives AAPL
Analyst firm Citigroup today upgraded Apple's stock from hold to buy, despite difficulties with the company's product transitions. Citigroup said that Apple should begin beating earnings estimates again later in the year, and maintained its 12-month price target of $82, according to TheStreet.com. Citigroup expects Apple to unveil Intel-based iBooks as well as a new video iPod as early as April, and that Apple will complete its transition to Intel in August with a new dual-core Power Mac. "We believe the medium- to long-term story remains intact," Citigroup said. "In short, Apple remains one of the best ways to play the digitization of music, photos and video. While Vista may close the gap at the operating system level, Apple will maintain a lead with media management apps and on-line downloads." After contacting numerous U.S. Apple stores the firm discovered that almost none had the MacBook Pro in stock, and most still have waiting lists of between five and 50 people for the 1.83GHz model.
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And the difficulties are (a) delivering systems, which they are apparently back-ordered on, (b) the trouble people are having with these things, and (c) issues with compatibility and other fun stuff.
And no one cares that they were 'early' (although you say 'all there intel macs to the market', and the last time I checked, there's only three models out there, and many left to convert over). If apple was like other companies, they'd start pre-announcing products, give a reasonable time for actual delivery, and start delivering when they reach a critical mass of product. This, as opposed to their current "We're pre-announcing now, taking orders now, and we'll make up delivery estimates which we won't meet, but at least we hope by that point we'll actually start to dribble four of them out a day to claim 'they're shipping!'.
...as a data point.
Also Apple has been clearly stating expected initial shipping dates at all of the recent product announcements and they have been making those dates and in good volumes (no product with such short ramp times is able 100% to match initial peak demand). This is far better then say last year when Apple had to delay the iMac G5 by a couple of months after announcing it because chip volumes didn't come in as expected.
..hence why they likely stated the MBP was driving Apple stock price... anyway I am happy to see Apple's P/E come down to a more reasonable level after a good couple years of run up.
And what's the deal with the macbook's hissing?