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Wall Street Sees The Light (6/18/03)
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Attention, Apple stockholders: if you've been purposely avoiding checking AAPL's share price because your psychiatrist informed you that avoiding stress is the only way to suppress those pesky homicidal outbreaks, we're here to tell you that you can stop averting your gaze. By close of the market today, AAPL was at $19.12-- up about 93 cents, or over 5%. Not bad, right? But wait, it gets better; earlier in the day it had gotten as high as $19.48, setting a new year high. So there's one fewer reason for you to run amok with a chainsaw dipped in rat poison.
Why the price surge, you ask? Well, according to Yahoo! Finance, Apple actually received an upgrade by one of them thar analysts-- Needham & Company, to be exact. Needham upped AAPL from "Hold" to "Buy" due to "the strength of accelerating iPod sales, a possible rebound in Power Mac sales beginning this fall [Can you say "G5," children? We knew you could], and the fact that AAPL is abandoning its long-standing strategy of confining its software to the Mac platform." We assume Needham's talking about the upcoming iTunes for Windows, so we get the point, but we're going to be pedantic for a second, anyway: hey Needham, if Apple made a practice of "confining its software to the Mac platform," then why's it got QuickTime for Windows? Huh? Huh?
It's worth noting that two of Needham's three reasons for upping AAPL appear to be music-related, which may quiet some of the worrywarts who felt that Apple's recent focus on digital music is merely a desperation play to distract the public from the fact that Apple's hardware was looking mighty slow next to the competition's. Note that we're not saying that it isn't a distraction-- just that if it is, it's working; otherwise Needham's upgrade would have been based on nothing but speculation about the 970 showing up sometime soon. Let's hear it for bread and circuses. (Mmmmmm... Bread...)
Whatever the rationale, Needham's new price target for AAPL is $23 per share, which gives us all something to look forward to. Keep that chainsaw in good working condition, though, because all it takes is a downgrade from some other analyst who doesn't like what Steve says this Monday to send the stock drifting lower again. If that happens, though, at least you'll know whom you should eviscerate, so it's a win-win situation! Road trip to NYC!
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SceneLink (4022)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 6/18/03 episode: June 18, 2003: Alleged images of the alleged Power Mac G5 are coming out of the alleged woodwork. Meanwhile, Needham upgrades AAPL to Buy with a $23 price target, and Massachusetts now stands alone as the only state still challenging Microsoft's proposed "Redmond Justice" settlement...
Other scenes from that episode: 4021: The Floodgates Are Open (6/18/03) Welcome, one and all, to the phenomenon known as Pixel Flood. You've certainly noticed this sort of thing happening before; in the final week leading up to a Stevenote (especially one at which Fearless Leader is expected to announce new hardware), a flurry of badly overcompressed JPEGs saturates the 'net, each purporting to be some sort of smuggled spy photo or "artist's conception" of the genuine article... 4023: The Cheese Stands Alone (6/18/03) Lightweights! All of 'em, lightweights! Remember that whole "Redmond Justice" fracas, in which, over the course of several years and several million taxpayer dollars, Microsoft was proven by an overwhelming preponderance of evidence to have willfully and illegally abused its monopoly position? Remember how, even after having lost on appeal, Microsoft's proposed settlement describes a "remedy" tantamount to a quick flick on the earlobe and a free lollipop?...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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