Jeez, who took a whiz in your Cheerios?
Apple's on the way out? That's what people were saying 5 years ago when the stock was languishing around $7/share and the company was left for dead. Sour grapes notwithstanding, Apple does have a history of effing it up about once a decade or so. Will that be the iPhone? I doubt it.
That said, I prefer stocks that are more reasonably valued.
-Rich
You working the night shift Nick? Otherwise you need to lay off during the day.
Drift: I just remembered that one of
Dvorak's troll articles a year or so back predicted that Apple would have to convert to running Macs on Windows because
there aren't enough drivers for OS X. Now that he said he loves his iMac somebody needs to ask him how many
drivers he needs that he can't get. For that matter, when did he ever have to install a
driver on his iMac? You know how we hear lots of stories about people not being able to get DVD burners working on Macs.
Of course, once Apple switched to Intel and it became possible to run Windows on Macs, Dvorak claims he predicted that. That wasn't what he predicted.
Y'all take my comments too seriously, I enjoy the competition from Apple with the PC market, because it only stands to make both better systems.
That said, I've been saying for years that there were 3 mistakes Apple would make.
1) When news started leaking about the switch to Intel, I said that it would be a mistake since the one advantage Macs really had over PCs was stability against crashes.
2) The iPod will not carry the company forever, and one day, Apple would start to make computers based on the iPod, or iPods based on Macs, and it would wind up being a gigantic mistake as the reason the iPod works is because it is not a computer, and it is a separate tool for a separate market.
3) They will succumb to their own fanboys wrath when they start to make marketing decisions that would alienate their fanbase. They will be faced with a choice: Appeal to their base, or appeal to others, thereby losing their base.
I also made a prediction that Apple would come out with a PDA that would actually compete with the Palm Pilots that were popular at the time. I was wrong about that, but the iPhone is a pretty close estimate.
Apple is following a very predictable path, and that path is headed right towards IBMdom, where everyone knows the name, but few actually use the product. I firmly believe that IBM is not far from doom, and Apple will follow suit right behind it.
And now, my prediction for the future of Apple: Within the next decade, Apple will start to sell high end business machines like copiers, faxes, phone systems, etc. There will be an Apple certification process like there is for Cisco, and it will be just as much a joke as the Cisco certification is/was. At first, it will take off like crazy, but with the nextgen iPhones, iPods, iFax and iCopy, iPBX, iMac, iLaser, iNuclearWarhead, and iPlane, Apple will slowly start to slide out of control as too large a company.
But in the next few years, watch for the high end business machine market out of Apple. Its coming.
