beech_35

15 Comments

    • ON: Thu May 8th 00:06 AM
      Commented on:
      Apple Links Higher Sales with Higher Prices
      frugal I am typing this on my nine year old iMac DV. It's running Tiger, the predecessor to Leopard, which represents six OS upgrades over the years not counting incremental updates. (it shipped with OS 9.1, upgraded to 9.2, and all the OS X updates from beta through 10.4.11). All the user accounts I established in OS 9 are still intact. I've never had a problem upgrading the OS. Could you do that with a PC? How many PCs have you bought over that same period of time?

      Macs aren't more expensive. It's a myth. Configured feature for feature, they cost exactly the same as PCs. Factor in premature obsolescence of PC hardware and the ten year cost of a Mac is probably half that of a PC.
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    • ON: Mon Apr 28th 11:08 AM
      Commented on:
      Apple's Bountiful Revenues Are Bigger Than Ever
      Meant to say "frequent calls to the IT help desk". In 22 years of owning Apple products, I have never had to call their tech support. Ever. Try that with your PC.
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    • ON: Mon Apr 28th 11:04 AM
      Commented on:
      Apple's Bountiful Revenues Are Bigger Than Ever
      There are a huge number of people who have Macs at home and love them, but like User above are chained by their employer to the tyranny of Windows. Count me among them. By comparison, Windows is clunky, old-school, requires calls to the IT help desk, and frequent forced power downs when it locks up. This takes lots of time at work when I'm on the clock, but here's no room in my personal life for such annoyances. My latest generation PC doesn't leave the trunk of my car when I'm home.

      Corporate CFOs must eventually realize what Windows costs them in lost productivity and expensive support. Now... ask yourself what will happen when businesses finally abandon the failed promises of Microsoft and turns to OS X.

      Second point... by most accounts Apple's overall computer market share stands at 6%. Their laptop market share is estimated to be at least twice that much. This is DOUBLE the market share from eighteen months ago, and there is reason to believe this growth will continue. Computers represent a much higher margin item for AAPL.

      One downside... Apple computers enjoy a much longer service life than anything running Windows. I've owned Macs exclusively for 22 years. They have at least a six year time in service life and become functionally obsolete much later, so AAPL won't sell replacement computers as frequently as Dell and HP's throwaway junk. Factor that into your purchase cost fatcat.
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    • ON: Fri Apr 25th 15:09 PM
      Commented on:
      What It Would Take To Fix Microsoft For Me
      Correction: Apple's newest OS (Leopard) installs and runs fine on machines as much as seven years old. All you need is a G4, 867 MHz, was available on the Power Mac G4 introduced mid - 2001.

      Tiger runs fine on machines even older than that.

      Windows generally requires new hardware with every OS upgrade.
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    • ON: Thu Mar 20th 08:58 AM
      Commented on:
      Apple Pushes Its Envelope Further Than Ever
      I'd love to install Safari on my Windows laptop, but it needs administrator privileges. My company's IT gods, who depend upon the trouble-prone and user-hostile Windows "experience" to justify their existence won't permit anything other than dated, security-flawed, and horrible MSIE 6. Firefox does not need admin privileges so much to their chagrin I use it instead. I refuse to use Explorer except for those (fortunately, very few) web sites that demand it. If Apple would release a version of Safari that does not require admin privileges to install I'd gladly use it.
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    • ON: Mon Mar 3rd 16:06 PM
      Commented on:
      Two Notes on Apple; Bad News Appears Priced In
      "Analysts merely find ways to justify the movements of a stock; they have no predictive or fundamental analysis that is worth anything at all."
      Great quote; sums up everything I've always believed about analysts. I have compiled notable analyst quotes dating back to 1997 and love to throw them back in their face. Nearly none of them understand that Apple also builds - surprise! - computers. AAPL has been dragged down by widespread crummy economic conditions completely unrelated to the company's performance, and at $120 it's a steal. When the market recognizes this company's growing market acceptance (example: guess what laptop maker just surpassed Dell in the education market) the analysts will be raising their targets again.
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    • ON: Thu Jan 3rd 17:04 PM
      Commented on:
      Does Apple's Market Share Gain Really Matter?
      Safari and Firefox are compliant with international standards. MSIE isn't. Whether or not you consider this a factor in designing websites, it's a bad idea to exclude any portion of your potential market. Considering Safari an "insignificant share of the market" is, to put it mildly, a shortsighted business decision.

      Every successful internet retailer's website functions with Safari. Imagine what would happen if Amazon or Ebay consciously decided to make their websites compatible only with IE. If a website requires IE to function, I can't use it.
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    • ON: Wed Dec 12th 19:09 PM
      Commented on:
      Will Apple's Leopard OS Change the PC Industry?
      I added more memory and installed a bigger HD, but I'm still using my eight year old iMac every day. It runs the latest version of OS X Tiger. Remember this is a computer that's older than Windows 2000. I've never had the slightest problem with it. Not one crash or hiccup, ever. No spyware etc. despite the fact it's always on and it's always connected. The only time I reboot is to install an OS update which happens every three or four months. Try that with anything from Dell or HPQ. It's not even true that Macs are more expensive either. Once you configure them feature for feature, they cost exactly the same as anything else.
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    • ON: Tue Dec 11th 14:26 PM
      Commented on:
      Study Projects Apple Laptops Top Consumer Choice Next Quarter
      This confirms what I've been witnessing as a growing trend that's even accelerated over the past year or so. At least a third of the laptops I see in daily use are Apples, and that number continues to grow. The last reason to buy anything other than an Apple computer ended with their introduction of Intel CPUs. Funny thing is, all the Apple computers I see are running OS X, not Windows. Windows users have been collectively banging their heads against the same wall for way too long. It must feel good to finally STOP!
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    • ON: Fri Nov 23rd 14:02 PM
      Commented on:
      Why I'm All About Apple
      Mac owners can only chuckle and say "welcome, and by the way, where have you been the past ten, fifteen years?"

      Several weeks ago I had a rather heated discussion with a long-time PC devotee, who "can't stand Apple" and had recently spent $5500 on a custom built high end Dell workstation, but recently had to replace its hard disk twice in eighteen months. After telling me everything he expects to do with his computer, I tried in vain to convince him to buy an Apple. He eventually conceded my points were valid, but he just "prefers the Windows way". In the end I managed to convince him to go to an Apple store, not to buy anything, just to check things out and see what's new.

      A week later he called me. You guessed it - he exited the Apple store with a brand new iMac. I asked how its performance compares to his ultra-high-end Windows box. He laughed and said "actually, I haven't used it since I bought the iMac."
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    • ON: Fri Nov 23rd 13:47 PM
      Commented on:
      Why I'm All About Apple
      From the Safari menu, Edit > Spelling > Check Spelling as You Type.
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    • ON: Tue Nov 13th 21:37 PM
      Commented on:
      Six Stocks to Buy, Five Stocks to Short
      I appreciate the author's candor but would restate - NO market is for the faint-hearted. The market will reward investor research and patience, and will mercilessly punish those running with the herd. Having said that, I'd ask Mr. Cherukuri if his decision to sell AAPL wasn't at least a little bit emotionally induced. There was nothing substantive about Apple that would warrant such a selloff, and in hindsight today's closing price will look like a buying opportunity. There are few companies like Apple, and I've long on AAPL since Steve Jobs returned some ten years ago.

      Garmin is one of those few companies. It also fell victim to the tech selloff with NO substantive news to warrant it, and is now a screaming good deal at $80. Like Apple, Garmin makes innovative, superior products, with brilliant leadership. I've been waiting for just this opportunity to buy.

      Don't like the CNBC news? All the tickers are red? Those who have done their research will find screaming good deals when all the news is bad! Absolutely no one is recommending financial stocks now. What does that tell you?

      Mr. Cherukuri, your head is in the right place. Follow it, not your gut. Look for AAPL to exceed its previous highs in January. GRMN will probably exceed them sooner than that.
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    • ON: Mon Nov 5th 10:52 AM
      Commented on:
      The Mac OS X Malware Myth Continues
      It also took 5 years to change the eye candy on Windows 95 (aka ME, W2K) as it took 5+ years to change the eye candy of Windows 3.1 which was essentially eye candy for DOS to begin with.

      OS X is the only OS with origins in a multiuser, multitasking, secure OS, while Windows in all its incarnations has been an attempt to retrofit security to an aging interface.

      With OS X, Apple completely scrapped its legacy OS and started over with a clean sheet using a BSD Unix core. Windows has no analogous core other than MS-DOS. Without scrapping Windows and starting from scratch, nothing from MSFT will ever be as secure as OS X.
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    • ON: Wed Oct 24th 23:15 PM
      Commented on:
      Depending on Long-Term Aggressive Growth for Apple is a Gamble
      People have been digging Apple's grave for decades. OS X is a flop, the iPod was flawed, Apple stores will fail just like Gateway's and the iPhone was an iPOS. Remember what was said about the iMac? Critics labeled it a failure - for lack of a floppy disk! Not to mention anything John Dvorak has written. All the while Apple kept innovating and growing, stubbornly making fantastic products, adding to a large cash cushion, and growing shareholder value. Not even I would have guessed AAPL could ever exceed IBM in market cap.

      Apple is now ideally positioned to capitalize on a sea change in the computing status quo. It's about time people are waking up the fact that Apple reliably delivers quality while Microsoft's offerings have failed to deliver the user experience so often promised. Vista is a disappointment at best. MSFT's enormous success also presents a huge obstacle to any meaningful change to its basic interface, and any box maker reliant on MSFT is going to see their futures tied to an aging interface. Dell and HPQ computers are already considered throwaway junk, how are they going to look in the future, when all they can run is Windows?

      As a long term investment, AAPL has a long way to go before any sane person would put it in the same league as a bank or GE or KO. That's why Warren Buffet doesn't buy tech, no tech stock in the world has been around for a century like them. BRKA might buy tech around the year 2080.

      Several reasons I think the outlook is decidedly positive for AAPL over the next five to ten years: The iPhone is likely to be a franchise, and a high margin one at that. Its worldwide market is virtually limitless. iTMS and iPods already are. The biggest potential for huge success is computers - a much higher margin product for them. Having languished for too long, market share is finally accelerating. Some accounts put laptop market share already at 20%.

      If there is speculative value in APPL right now, it's on their computers, but given recent trends I think it's worth the risk. Ten or more years from now? That's an eternity in tech. In 2017, AAPL might be the next MSFT - and you can interpret that any way you like!
      View article »
    • ON: Mon Oct 15th 15:16 PM
      Commented on:
      Over-Hyped Apple Has No Real Value
      Change the title then. A misleading title helps to discredit everything that follows.

      I'll agree that there is some speculative value to the current share price, but it is grounded in what a lot of other posters have said: While the iPod and iPhone have recently been providing reliable cash flow, Apple's computer market share is accelerating in an era when computer users are ready to change the status quo. All the box makers (Dell, HPQ) that chained themselves to Microsoft's OS offerings have overpromised and underdelivered the user experience. This stands in stark contrast to Apple's accomplishments for the past several years. They are the only company in the world that sells the whole widget. Among computer manufacturers, Apple is the sole company that can both promise and deliver the entire user experience, and they have been doing so, reliably, for decades.

      Apple's current position in the technical arena is analogous to the shoemaker who decides to establish his business in a neighborhood where 95% of the population goes barefoot.
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