Apple is innovating ahead of the market. I am not ready to buy an iPhone or a new MacAir ultra thin laptop, right, unveiled this week. Not because they aren't worth it. I'm just not there. Yet. But I think I will be and it is just a matter of time.
I've noticed the stock going down, which it usually does after the pre-MacWorld rallies and I've been up on Apple and glad I bought stock two years ago after being completely sold on my mac and all it could do. My son is thinking about buying some Apple stock but I'm telling him to hold off for right now while the short-termers sell out then pick it up on the low slide and hold it. I'm not a trained stockbroker by any means, just crazy about my mac and Apple. But will Apple be good for the long-term? I think so. I've spent some time thinking about what Apple unveiled and what might be ahead...
A channel changer with no more than five buttons? I bet that is in Apple's future, too.
I write this notes more for a brain file than for readers but you know... my husband now loves his mac. My son, the only family member not on a mac, is the one chirping about wanting to buy the stock. Go figure. The people who tell me about their new Apple products do so with giddyness. I just had a long conversation today with my cousin (who doesn't "do" computers) who tells me her favorite Christmas present was an iPod and she raved about how much she is loving listening to the book, Infidel, telling me not to read it, but to listen to it. My mother reads a ton of books on her iPod, too. She is Oklahoma County's number one client for library book requests and she's listening to a huge number of books in her "reading repetoire".
Steve Jobs thinks
the Amazon Kindle book reader would go nowhere "largely
because Americans have stopped reading" and he said 40% of the people
in the U.S. read one book or less last
year. He is moving Apple in a direction for tech and I think it might
be foundational. If you think his ideas don't resonate, remember that
his 2005 commencement speech
at Stanford still reverberates. He is innovating with the younger
market in mind -- the market that is quick to adapt to new tech changes
and devices. They are already there with him on iPods and iTunes, and
his iPhones are #2 for smart phones. Go hang out in an Apple store for awhile and look at the crowd. While older folks are buying watches, which I think are already fossils while time has moved digital, the crowd flocking about in the stores are the younger crowds who will drive the markets through their purchases. But these later moves by the older crowds to the iPods are just one example of Apple being ahead of the market.
Rob Pegaro, tech writer for the Washington Post, wrote in December that tech innovation has not happened in three areas in which the status quo began to crumble in 2007: Computing revolving around Microsoft; wireless carriers controlling what cellphones could do; and record labels locking legal music downloads with software to limit their use.
The design changes Jobs plans could be so far from our abilility -- yet
-- to grasp and use and the market may yet take awhile to "get there"
and in the meantime, will these ideas be worth something in the
future?
MacBook Air laptop and its new deal for movie rentals (movies will now be available from major studios) and its new version of the Apple TV set-top box, “Take Two” (the latter didn't get much play this week but like the second release of iPhone, it is issued at a lower price the second time) position Mac to be ready for a move to Mac TV which will come later. With the new shift to hdtv in '09, Mac is ready to pounce.
The new notebook (more details here) doesn't have a CD/DVD drive, is thin, weighs 3 pounds, $1,799, has limited memory and a slower processor compared to other Apple laptops. A Remote Disk will make it possible to play the contents of a DVD via a wireless network from another Macintosh or Windows PC. Some wonder if this new design will limit digital photo/movies and music storage and I think the move is for storage of items off of the computer and the computer moving to be a creative enterprise and an access to the web with more things being kept on the web or other storage devices not on the computer. Apple is set to be a player device, becoming strong for portals and this is where Apple's moves are key, I think.
Jobs also announced this week the first major software upgrade for the iPhone. He surprised analysts by reporting that Apple sold four million iPhones during their first six months on the market (an average of 20,000 a day), a number significantly above most market research firms’ projections. After all of the hoopla of the announcements, why did Apple shares slip, losing 5.5% on that first day trading? Because he didn't unveil a big thing like the iPhone and some think that no one will flock to the new computer. It is the concept of the direction that I think is being overlooked.
Apple's new operating system released in '07, Leopard, has been the most successful new OS release in the company's history.
If Apple is thinking that tech toys are just portals/players, look where the trends come following Apple's device innovations: On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device.
My bet is that Apple is gearing towards an access platform for web and use platform for entertainment and the media players will have the edge in the future. They already have top tech capabilities for creativity generation. It already holds the favored position for creative types.
I like to follow Rob Pegaro who covers tech for the Washington Post. He wrote this, which I think is significant: "Jobs, wearing his usual black turtleneck and unbelted jeans, also threw out some numbers as evidence of Apple's "extraordinary" 2007. He said that the company has sold 500,000 copies of Leopard since its release in late October, and that 19 percent of Macs had already been upgraded to the new operating system. iPhones made up almost 20 percent of the smartphone market in the third quarter of last year making the iPhone the second most-popular smartphone; Research In Motion's Blackberry led the category with a 39 percent share, and Palm was the third biggest vendor with 9.8 percent share."
iPhone's market share will push innovation. The other media devices are ahead of the market. Apple drove innovation by dropping the floppy disks before anyone was ready to move beyond floppy. Apple will be driving innovation in the same way. IBM next week will announce the release of software for iPhone, iPod touch and Mac OS X (which will make Microsoft Office less dominant); IGG software has released iBank for use on Apple products.
The cross-pollination is what is exciting and is the type of luster that is missing from other tech releases (which is why Microsoft seems so dull).
Pegaro wrote in December: In the first 10 months of 2007...8.6 percent of new computer sales were Macs -- up from 5.4 percent in the comparable period in 2006 and 3.4 percent in the first 10 months of 2004. Apple's sales successes are strong.
Let everyone pooh-pooh Job's ideas, let the stock go down some more on their hot air and then, I say to my son, buy and hold. Google was just new and hot before the last bubble, too.
Related:
The iPhone and Pop Icons
The Architecture of the Apple
Apple: Enough, Already?
Apple Creatively Soldiers On
The Big Apple's New Apex
Apple: Cover Stuff Again
Apple's Brilliant Idea for the Architecture of (Our) Spaces
I have been a mac fan and addict for the last twenty... five years, ever since the Apple IIe. I'm drooling over the MacAir ultra thin, not because it will be ultra thin, but ultra light! It will not cds or dvds, but you'll be able to do this on your older mac, through wifi!
I think that is sooooo smart.
I have been keeping all my data on external harddisk for the longest time already, which gives speed and longer life to both my laptop and my desktop computer.
I did have a PC for a couple of years, and hated every single minute of it. There was always something not working!
Posted by: Claude | January 17, 2008 at 01:40 AM