Timeline Strategy Consulting

A Sign of the Times: Macs on Sale

Hi Buffeted - You absolve him of wrongdoing but the fact is that 'journalists' engage in this kind of monkey business with Apple constantly. Constantly! No other company attracts sure-fire interest with these salacious headlines. Eric Savitz is the master but he has many followers.

If we are going to receive opinions from journalists, especially 'citizen journalists', we need to have standards. Facts:

1. 'Sign of the times' doesn't imply an annual post-Thanksgiving event. It implies economics so bad that even Apple must discount.
2. '....that you can pretty much always bank on...' is not just bad writing, it's incorrect. See links for Black Friday listings from years past. You can bank on Apple having Black Friday sales every year.
3. '....but the fact that Macs are being discounted says something about what retailers are willing to do to get people to shop during this gloomy economy.' Again, wrongly confounds an annual event with desperation.
4. '...Apple itself has reportedly authorized its managers at the Apple stores to price-match competitors discounts....'. This doesn't strike me as desperation, but rather Apple's intense interest to control the quality and quantity of its sales through its own channel. They should be doing this 24/7 in order to protect people from from buying Apple products from BestBuy, for instance. This is due to one question - can you honestly tell me that you'll get the same technical or customer service at BestBuy as you will at an Apple Store? Price matching is just a way to get customers to convert to that channel.

I'm not interested in reading monkey business about Apple or any other technology company in which I invest. This is nothing personal against Sam or any other writer, but anyone linked from the Yahoo! AAPL investment page should have their facts straight and not travel the laziest route to get readers. Sorry if that's the coarse truth, but I can't excuse that.


On Nov 25 07:12 PM Buffeted wrote:

> Wow! take it easy guys, all he said was that apple products rareley
> go on sale, nothing about a first time for thanksgiving or anything.
>
> Nice blog sam. Now maybe apple will get back to 180 a little sooner
> than a million years.

A Sign of the Times: Macs on Sale

Hi Sam: You must be paid by the eyeball, thus your tantalizing but incorrect headline to maximize attention for a non-newsworthy event.

A simple Google search confirms what the previous 2 posters said. This is an annual Apple event:

www.macrumors.com/2007.../

forums.macrumors.com/s...

www.appleinsider.com/a...

Ah, the internets. It makes it so easy to be, and to be proven, wrong.