Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[langostino]

AAPL good and bad

the beat was by 2 cents ... 16 v. 14. Guidance up. Stronger than expected pro and consumer laptops. Huge iPod quarter would have been bigger but, it ran so far ahead of projections they literally couldn't meet demand.

The consumer desktop (iMac), already a hole in the lineup, had a poor holiday season. Priced outside the acceptable price-band, and the company knows it. They boxed themselves in with all-in-one flat panels and they can't get them down.

But the real negative that kept the quarter at "good" rather than "blowout" was the unit shipment miss on the new pro desktop Powermac G5s which missed pre-quarter guidance by a whopping 25%. That miss alone cost them 4 cents EPS on the bottom line and cost them the blowout quarter that should have been a layup. That's where the majority of analyst questions went. They've got the entry level pro model priced far too high, but aside from that, no real answers. Apparently the strategy is sell more iPods and sing kumbayah.