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VIOLENT waves are tossing about the world’s largest financial institutions like toys made of balsa. The dark skies ahead can’t be anything but a recession. Sheets of cold rain have already been smacking the retail sector. And yet, at the helm of the good ship Apple, all seems well.
Paul Sakuma/Associated Press
Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief, with the aluminum frame for the new MacBook Pro.
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No battening down the hatches or throwing on the storm gear there. In the teeth of what may be a once-in-50-years storm, Steven P. Jobs calmly keeps the company on the same course it has been following since the skies were clear.
Premium prices for premium products — surely this is a formula most unsuited for frugal times. But the analysts with whom I spoke aren’t particularly concerned; all, it seems, list Apple as a buy. (That may be because Apple’s shares have fallen 51 percent so far this year, versus 35 percent for the Nasdaq, making Apple seem a relative bargain.)
Mr. Jobs’s serenity was on public display last Tuesday, when Apple introduced a refreshed lineup of notebook computers and a new wide-screen display monitor. The one concession to the surrounding gloom was a minor one, moving the price for the entry-level MacBook down to $999 from $1,099. But this model lacks the innovative features that Mr. Jobs and his colleagues lavished their attention upon, like the exterior case milled from a single block of aluminum. The other notebooks are priced from $1,299 to $2,499.
Mr. Jobs’s excitement about those new unibody aluminum cases may seem puzzling, but his interest in computer cases is a longstanding quirk. His Next Computer, introduced in 1988, was housed in a 12-inch cube of die-cast magnesium. Metallurgists were impressed; prospective buyers were not.
Before Mr. Jobs introduced the updated Mac notebooks last week, one of the more persistent rumors circulating on technology blogs was that Apple would acknowledge the worsening prospects for consumer spending and bring out a simple, ultraportable machine priced in the neighborhood of $800. It did not appear.
It’s possible that the financial side of Apple’s executive suite sees an urgent need for the company to add products with lower prices, and that the product side, the one that most interests Mr. Jobs, is resisting. Or perhaps no one sees a need to change course.
We’ll soon get a glimpse of what Mr. Jobs and his colleagues see: on Tuesday, the company will release its earnings report for the quarter that ended Sept. 30.
The numbers will undoubtedly document Apple’s momentum in taking market share from Windows-equipped PCs. Yair Reiner, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Company, wrote earlier this month that he expected sales of Apple’s desktop models to grow 13 percent, to 4.3 million, in the 2009 fiscal year and notebook sales to increase by 12 percent, to 6.76 million. Even if the industry suffers a downturn, he expects that Apple will suffer less than its competition and will still gain market share. “The upshot is that even against a very bleak macroeconomic backdrop,” Mr. Reiner said, “Apple should be able to continue growing.”
Not all observers of Apple, however, are sanguine. If the recession is severe, “eventually, everybody gets slaughtered at some point,” says Tavis McCourt, an analyst at Morgan Keegan & Company.
Apple need not be much concerned about its rival Microsoft, which can do little but bang its head against the wall in despair about the Vista fiasco. As if Microsoft’s marketers had not suffered enough indignities, Computerworld gleefully discovered last month that some images for Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” campaign posted on the company’s own corporate site had been created with Macs. (Microsoft has since scrubbed away the incriminating mention of the Mac in the images’ meta-data.) As well as Macs are doing, analysts say Apple’s greatest potential resides in the iPhone. Andy Hargreaves, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, describes the iPhone as “the hottest consumer electronics product in the world,” a “game-changing product” that outdistances wireless players on the hardware side, like Nokia, Motorola and Research In Motion, and all the players on the software side, too, including Microsoft, Symbian and Palm.
The first-generation iPhone, unveiled last year, did well, but it’s the second generation, the 3G, that has taken off since its introduction last July. The just-ended quarter is the first in which investors will see the impact on Apple’s income statement. Until Apple releases its earnings, Mr. Hargreaves said, “nobody really knows what the economics are.”
Mr. Reiner, too, is looking forward to the earnings announcement with more than the usual interest. Apple has had great success in part because it has convinced customers to turn away from a $1,000 Windows laptop and to buy its $1,600 laptop instead for its stunning displays and ease of use. Historically, Apple has been conservative when giving estimates of its future financial performance to investors, Mr. Reiner said. If, despite the economic downturn, Apple foresees strong demand for its products in the next quarter, the company’s prospects are bright indeed.
Looking beyond the immediate quarter, and even beyond the next calendar year, Mr. Reiner said he was extremely optimistic about Apple’s future — because of the iPhone, which is a miniaturized computer with, incidentally, phone functionality.
“Who is going to do best?” he asked. “The traditional wireless hardware companies, whose expertise is in radio frequency, or an Apple, with expertise in marrying hardware to software?”
IF hard times do arrive, Apple has a perfectly clean balance sheet, with $20.8 billion in cash and no debt. The biggest problem that its corporate treasury faces is what to do with the cash, which Shannon Cross, of Cross Research, estimates will grow to about $30 billion by the end of 2009.
Ms. Cross says she expects Apple to pursue a more aggressive pricing strategy for the iPhone, not because of the recession but because the worldwide market for phones is too large — a billion phones sold annually — for Apple to be content with the 10 million units or so it will sell this calendar year.
“In 2009,” she predicts, “we’ll get a lower-priced iPhone — iPhone Nano — which will bring it to the masses.”
Apple may well turn into a story for the Weather Channel, as well as for CNBC, if it has indeed found a patch of blue sky that follows it wherever it sails.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
