As the Apple faithful gather in San Francisco, Merrill Lynch rains on the parade and advises Apple investors to sell.
This should be a great time for Apple, people are increasingly buying PC’s and software because of good design, something that Apple excels at. As the PC market saturates, Dell and Gateway and the likes are selling peripherals, again, with the iPod, Apple has demonstrated its prowess. Thirdly Apple has successfully courted a new market, developers, with the popularity of its Unix based operating system.
Merrill’s gripe is that Apple’s hardware product pipeline is stymied by the fact that it cannot compete with Wintel PC’s on price/performance. So what is the problem? Answer, Intel not inside. Apple went with Motorola, and Motorola got distracted elsewhere and could not match the price performance of Intel. Although Apple are switching away from Motorola, it is not to AMD or Intel, but to IBM.
And with Intel inside what could I get? A fast, dual-boot OS X/Windows Titanium laptop – now that’s something I would like to have. However mad it sounds, running two operating systems is no different from what millions of people used to do often when switching between DOS and Windows applications. Apple have a suite of media tools that make the dual plaform worth it. My ‘switch’ – would be back and forth, not permanent.