Editorial

Posted on 6 Oct 2008 at 17:41

 

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If Apple is going to ride out the global financial slump, its mysterious 'transition' product will have to be something pretty special...

News of Apple's ever-rising stock was starting to get boring, don't you think? Yet that hardly makes a rock-like drop any easier to swallow. As we were putting this issue together, the price of Apple shares fell to a 52-week low, with analysts cutting their target prices from $200 per share to, in one case, as little as $115. The darling of the tech world, it would seem, is in just the same boat as everyone else.

Thankfully, the stock did rebound, closing up 8% one day after an 18% fall, but it should serve as a long-overdue warning to all those ambitious investors who have been hyping the company for the past three years.

Apple's most visible product lines - the iPod and iPhone - are ultimately luxury goods, and few of us can justify buying either on pure utility grounds. If you already have an iPod, the improvements Apple made to the latest breed of nano, classic and touch offer little to induce an upgrade. And if you have a mobile phone... well, do you really need to swap it for an iPhone?

However, a potentially far more serious problem lies in Apple's computer line-up: it's simply too good. iMacs, Mac Pros and the like run and run and run, like the proverbial Duracell bunny. Indeed, the chances are that a machine you bought six or seven years ago is still going strong. Or at least strong enough to hang onto it as we weather the current financial storm.

That's why the well-trailed 'transition' product Apple is expected to debut in the middle of this month will be so important. It must be so radically different that it's nothing less than a must-have upgrade. If not, the share price will likely slide again, and continue heading south until Snow Leopard appears in the middle of next year.

Snow Leopard's developer builds are Intel-only, and if Apple chooses to follow that road with the final release - regardless of the uproar it will undoubtedly face from some quarters - it could force enough of a hardware upgrade wave to give its stock a serious shot in the arm.

The trouble is, that could be too late. Which begs the question: could the current financial crisis be sufficient to bring forward Snow Leopard's uncaging? The answer depends very much on how many developers Apple can divert from other projects, and which projects will suffer as a result.

Author: Nik Rawlinson