Posted on 02/11/2005 9:48:42 PM PST by HAL9000
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Computer Inc., whose shares have almost quadrupled in value over the last year on the success of its iPod music player, on Friday said it set a 2-for-1 stock split, and its shares rose almost 4 percent.Shares of Apple have been on a tear as iPod sales have soared with the introduction of less-expensive versions of the music player. The stock has been the best performer in the Nasdaq 100 index and the wider S&P 500 index over the past 12 months.
Apple is also one of the most expensive stocks among the 30 largest technology companies that make up the Computer Technology Index trading on American Stock Exchange.
Apple's last stock split had been in 2000, at the height of the technology boom. Previously it had had a stock split in 1987
Splits do not change the value of stocks but tend to make a stock more attractive to small investors who are often wary about betting on high-dollar stocks, experts said. Splits may also indicate that management has confidence in continuing to grow earnings and that as a result the stock price will rise.
But the high expectations indicated by a steep share price can mean that the company has less room for disappointment. For example, shares of Internet auction company eBay have lost about 20 percent since Jan. 19, when it reported earnings below Wall Street expectations for the first time in at least three years.
Apple is trading at 39 times over its projected for earnings per share next year, compared with a price/earnings ratio of 14 for Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc., the world's top personal computer provider, has a P/E of 32 and Gateway carries a P/E of 30.
But many analysts continue to favor Apple.
Pacific Crest Securities analyst Steve Lidberg said, "We continue to like the stock. The momentum behind iPod and the new Mac products continue to bode very well for the company to exceed expectations in the next several quarters."
He added, "The split makes it a little bit easier to buy for individual investors but it does not change the fundamentals."
Among the 26 analysts polled by Reuters Estimates, 15 rated Apple "buy" or "outperform," 9 rated it "hold," and only one had a "sell" rating. One analyst had no opinion.
Apple has posted better-than-expected earnings and revenues for at least the last seven quarters, and analysts raised their estimates for the current quarter after Apple raised its outlook.
Under the share split, Apple shareholders of record at the close of business on Feb. 18 will receive one additional share for every outstanding share held. Apple said trading will begin on a split-adjusted basis on Feb. 28.
Apple said there will be a proportional increase in the number of its shares authorized from 900 million to 1.8 billion.
Apple shares rose $2.85 to $81.21 at the close of trade on Nasdaq. The stock over the last year has gone from $23 to an all-time high of $81.99 per share on Wednesday.
If you want to edit home movies, the Mini-Mac is going to be slow; unless you are doing the most basic work. Now, I LIKE the Mac Mini; but first you must understand what it is, and what it is not. It is NOT comparable to a higher powered PC; which many people want to do. Benchmarks will illustrate the difference between processing power, memory bandwidth and limitations imposed by a cheaper design.
But more interesting, is what the Mini-Mac IS. It's small, streamlined for use not only as a central hub for a home theater (small, quiet, DVI port, ethernet, Bluetooth), it will lend itself to using your home theater to send email, send/recieve/record home movies and also accept HDTV movie downloads, as it supports both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD HDTV movie formats; thus competing in the same field as Hollywood Video; but in an area that Hollywood hasn't even began to explore - Broadband movie download rentals. While the video stores will find themselves re-living the Beta/VHS wars; and stocking movie versions in multiple formats (VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD); the Mini-Mac will accept all of them from the internet. Naturally, as one would expect, DCMA will be there to (very short term) prevent people from ripping the material to DVD format. But, this is an revolutionary change in the way we will watch movies.
MS Entourage, or Mac OS X Mail and iCal, etc.
Those are clients, not servers
What's Apples equivalent to MS SQL Server and what enterprise IT Director would seriously consider installing it?
Oracle 10g.
Apple makes Oracle Server?
What's Apples equivalent to MS AD Domain Controllers and what enterprise IT Director would seriously consider deploying it?
LDAP?
LDAP is "made" by Apple? Or is it just a protocol? Maybe you should read up on that.
What's Apples equivalent to MS Office and what enterprise IT Director would seriously consider deploying it?
Office for Windows? Apple iWork?
iWork? lol
A lot of IT Directors are experiencing a big climbdown in the corporate world lately. They look like fools for wasting valuable resources with all of Microsoft's security problems.
Not really. Maybe you should stick to what you know.
One add: The Mac Mini's Airport Extreme (wifi) allows sharing of content to other Minis, Macs and *gasp* maybe PCs running iTune-like Apple software.
Hollywood has already started "legal" Broadband movie downloads but only for the MS community.
Example: Movielink
The stats at the site you link to show weird things like Firefox with a 20% share, and Linux with a larger share than Mac. It's not representative of the universe.
Sorry, that's the best I could do in 60 seconds. Lunch was being served.
Mac OS X Server includes server software like Sendmail, MySQL, etc. Apple does sell a database system called FileMaker. But for the enterprise, Oracle 10g and Sybase are the best solutions, and Apple has wisely decided to support those systems rather than reinvent the wheel. Several other Mac OS X Server solutions are listed here.
Unfortunately, a lot of IT directors are becoming dinosaurs in the enterprise. Their prestige is declining in the corporation because of the bad decisions they've made. They foolishly believe that clinging to Microsoft will save them - but it won't.
"It's too slow to do movie editing, or graphic art stuff."
Not true - a G4 tower with similar specs was considered top of the line before the G5 shipped, and plenty of pros did high end work on them. A Mini will run the entire Adobe CS suite just fine (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat), and I run all that at work, and more, working on large (300 megs) files on a 400 mhz G4 Tower.
Drop a gig of ram in the Mini, it'll run Photoshop and the Macromedia web stuff like a champ.
A lot of office managers and art directors I know are looking at the Mini in a big way for production machines in prepress and design shops. No, the Mini will not be a good Maya machine, but very few consumer computers are - it'll run Maya, but if you want to work relatively painlessly, you need a pro machine, a G5 or Pentium 4 with all the bells and whistles. (It will run Strata3D fine, and my fave, Sketch-up)
As for games, it should run everything acceptably, except for the high-end ones, like Doom3, which you need a $3000 machine to run, even on the Windows side. I've been reading people are playing games like World Of Warcraft and Sim City4 with no issues.
The way I see it, look at it like a low-end Powerbook - if it'll run there, a Mini will run it.
Of course, it's pretty slow compared to the dual 2 gig G5 I'm typing this on at home. :)
"When you add all this up; I think Apple has a Grand-Slam coming up."
That's where my money is - with Tiger (Mac OS 10.4) being the next piece of the puzzle.
W3Schools' statistics are based only on visitors to its site, thus the number distribution.
Just one note: Doom 3 doesn't require a $3000 machine to run properly. Sure, it'll take every bit of power you can throw at it and crave more, but its minimum specs are actually playable. In most cases, the few people who needed to upgrade merely needed more RAM.
Bad stats are better than no stats - if you have info to the contrary, I'd like to have a look at it.
But, *IF* it runs like the G4 tower, as you have indicated; then Apple has slit it's own throat. Why would anyone buy a $499 Mac (ie. ~3-6% margins) instead of a $2,000 Mac (with 15-30% margins)? So, in laymans numbers, Apple will have to sell 20 Mini-Macs (~$15 profit) for each $2,000 Mac (~$300 profit). When you consider the 20x ramp in labor costs, due to production, coupled with reduced sales of the more expensive Macs; I foresee a catestrophy coming.
Jobs is no fool. That is my primary reasoning for questioning the performance statements you have made. Because, if the performance is as you state, Apple has just committed suicide.
My belief is that the Mini-Mac will be the HDTV answer to rental movies; that the iPod was to iTunes.
Apple has already tapped out publishing / media world (Photoshop users) whereas there are lot of new customers in the consumer electronics market (media hub users). The lesson from the iPod was new market creation was much more valuable to Apple than clinging to a high margin, low sales model. If the publishing / media world doesn't expand or has very little hardware turnover, Apple doesn't grow. What I call the "iPod effect" gives Apple something it didn't have before, product and sales diversity beyond just desktops and laptops. Now Apple has desktop, laptop, servers, iPods, and the Mini (media hub) as product lines and each can follow different economic patterns.
Sure, creating a new product type is good; but this doesn't necessarily create growth, unless there is a financial boon to accompany that. Hence, for Apple go cannibalize sales of high margin products with much lower margin components will crush Apple.
Now, if the Mini-Mac is targeted to a unique market niche, and does not perform like the higher end MacIntoshes we have a differnt story entirely. My statement is that the Mini-Mac does NOT compete with the G4 Tower Macs, due to limited performance (slow processor, limited memory, HDD, etc). Others insist that the Mini-Mac is equivalent to G4Towers; which would mean that Apple has just removed the justification to buy a $2,000 Mac with a $499 Mac. Or in other words, Apple saw fit to risk selling 30x more Mini-Macs in volume, than it currently sells in G4 Towers. Unless the Mini-Mac's target is to open a unique market that does not compete against the G4 Tower (Mini-Mac has the H.264 chip), the Mini-Mac will be a bad thing for Apple.
Apple's publishing and media customer set will not be thrilled about on the Mini-mac's relatively low memory and HD disk specs. IMHO, it's unlikely that someone is going to be running big Photoshop jobs or AVID on the Mini-Mac.
As for the Mini-Mac matching up well with older towers, the amount of RAM can be a limiting factor on the G3s and G4s for getting more out of software in addition to the processor. That's why the G5 towers have 4 or 8GB of maximum memory to keep disk reading and caching to a minimum.
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