Posted on 04/25/2006 6:07:08 PM PDT by Panerai
PiperJaffray senior analyst Gene Munster today maintained an "outperform" rating on Apple shares with a price target of $99, following an examination of data from his Amazon Top Seller list ratings. Apple's iPod is flourishing on the lists for portable MP3 players and all electronics, holding all 10 spots in the top 10. The analyst believes that Apple's iPod is still gaining market share, noting the device's recent rise to 77.9 percent in March, up from 76.8 percent in February. "We believe the increase is noteworthy given that the last time we recorded 10 iPods in the Top 10 occurred on September 9th, 2005, prior to the holiday shopping season," Munster noted. The number of Macs in the Top 10 and Top 20 decreased to eight and nine, from nine and 11, respectively. "The eight in the Top 10 remains at the upper end of all observations since we began tracking the Top Sellers," Munster wrote.
"For a point of reference, there were five Macs in the Top 10 one year ago. We believe that increase is primarily due to the recent launch of the new Intel=based iMac and MacBook Pros."
Munster also noted the steadily increasing internet traffic to Apple's website, indicating a growing interest in the company and its products.
"Apple.com has had a significant increase in 'reach' over the past quarter, which we believe is mainly the result of Apple's new product launches at Macworld on January 10th," Munster told clients in a his research report. "Apple's three-month average traffic rank of 45 on April 20th is the best value that we have observed for apple.com since we've tracked the Alexa data."
Alexa.com is a Web-based information provider that tracks statistics for nearly every main domain name in existence, and is particularly useful for identifying which websites are important to surfers. The "reach" rating signifies the number of users of a site, and Alexa.com expresses this statistic as the number of users per million.
"Apple's 3-month average reach of 13,255,000 on April 20th is the second best value that has been observed (high was on 13,300,000 on March 1st)," the analyst added. "While we realize Web 'traffic rankings' and 'reach' are not perfect measures of actual sales, we believe they are a decent indicator of overall mindshare."
PiperJaffray believes Apple will have shipped more than 85 million iPods by the end of 2006, providing Apple with a greater scope of awareness for various products, or a "halo effect." The company announced in its March quarter conference call that it had shipped 50 million iPods through the end of March 2005.
Thanks, iPod.
Maybe not the greatest stock, but certainly better than NY Times. :)
I have 500gb of music downloaded from cd, album and cassette. I love being able to put them on my ipod when I want. I listen to my favorite talk shows when I can and the rest of the time, the IPOD is going.
Ping.
Ipods rock.
Just think of them as audio recordings, just like one would record on an old cassette player, but stored on the iPod. The advantage is podcasts offer the ability to have your iPod automatically download the latest show. Plug the iPod in to the computer and it syncs up with iTunes to download any new podcasts for any shows to which you subscribe.
I should add, you don't even need an iPod to listen to podcasts. If you have a computer, Mac or Windows, with iTunes, you can subscribe to podcasts and listen to them on your computer. Of course the iPod makes it all nice and super portable.
OK, thanks, that's more concise than what I found on Wikipedia. Now, I was asking because while hunting for some legal MP3 in recent days I ran into offers of podcasts on various performers sites. But I was looking for MP3s of individual tunes, and it didn't seem to me that the podcasts were that, or that individual tunes could be extracted from them, so I passed...
Apple's profit margin is around 50%, Exxon's is 9%. The socialist emperors might redirect their envy temper tantrum.
>>Ipods will eventually be killed by cell phones, that will do the same thing and more.<<
As long as the online ITunes store remains strong and there is no way to play the music from on a phne unless its licensed by Apple there will be a stranglehold.
Now me, I refuse to buy encrypted music so my IPOD Nano is just because the sounds is great and the form factor is cool and tiny.
Some service will come along with a standard that will allow multiple devices to utilize it. I.E. Nextel, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Creative, etc. This will make competition and lower prices.
They will have something like this that will play video, music, function as a telephone, camera and get on the Internet.
>>They will have something like this that will play video, music, function as a telephone, camera and get on the Internet.<<
And while that would be fine for me, it won't play music or video from ITunes... look for the IPhone coming in the not too distant future.
why do you have to use Itunes?
>>why do you have to use Itunes?<<
I choose not to use ITunes but they are the leading online music source and the only online place to get things like Beatles songs and Disney owned Video so they are a force in the market.
Sony or someone will proabbly make an iTunes alternative.
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