High Probability of New Ultra-Portable Apple Notebook at MacWorld - Bear Stearns

Bear Stearns analysts Andy Neff, Bill Hand and Ted Chung sent a note to clients this morning previewing this week's Macworld. Key excerpts:

AAPL MacWorld: ultra-portable notebook, movie rental service, iPhone software update. While there is always a good chance of a surprise announcement (i.e., “one more thing”) from Steve Jobs during his Macworld keynote on Tuesday, January 15 (at 12nn ET/9am PT) in SF, below we highlight our assessment of likely product introductions:

Highest probability:

• Ultra-portable notebook with flash-based storage
• Movie rental service via iTunes
• New software update to iPhone (1.1.3) with improved user interface and features (e.g., home page icon modification, cell-tower-based GPS, etc.)
• iPhone with higher storage capacity (i.e., 16GB)
• New Apple TV software upgrade (to enable movie rental)

Medium probability: new Apple TV (hardware), with TV tuner and DVR/PVR feature; over-the-air music purchase for iPhone

Low probability: 3G iPhone, new iPod Shuffle

Stock implications: Positive for AAPL; mixed for STX, WDC (flash-based notebook could be perceived negative for hard disks).

Comments

[Long-Short Guy]

Interesting to think what the implications of the MacBook Air for the hard drive vendors are. Possibilities:

- The solid state drive version of the MacBook Air is much more expensive than the hard disk drive version, signalling that flash drives aren't cost competitive yet.

- The fact that Apple has offered a solid state drive shows that the writing is on the wall for the hard drive vendors.

- Apple's introduction of a hard-drive based wireless backup device shows that the optimal combination is a super light laptop with no hard drive combined with a hard-drive for backup. Net net: positive for the hard drive vendors.

[Long-Short Guy]

One additional thought: the wireless backup offers hard disk capacity of 500GB or 1TB -- that's much more than you'd ever find in a laptop. It might be that this is a net positive for the hard drive vendors.