Apple touted healthy sales of Macs and iPods in a conference call yesterday, but it was a mysterious reference to future products that has created the most buzz today. In its quarterly earnings call Monday, Apple’s chief financial officer Peter…
Apple touted healthy sales of Macs and iPods in a conference call yesterday, but it was a mysterious reference to future products that has created the most buzz today.
In its quarterly earnings call Monday, Apple’s chief financial officer Peter Oppenheim alluded to a “future product transition” while explaining why Apple’s gross margins will drop from 34.8 percent to 31.5 percent between July and September. That kind of teasing reference — without any specifics, naturally — has got analysts, tech bloggers and Mac fans busily speculating over just what those products will be.
Leading the list: A revamped line of MacBooks, or perhaps the long-awaited touch-screen Mac tablet.
Andy Hargreaves, a consumer electronics analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, predicts a refresh of the current line of MacBooks and MacBook Pros. MacRumors blogger Arnold Kim thinks the same. This makes sense, because the MacBook and MacBook Pro are reaching the end of their product cycles.
But some other analysts are expecting more from Apple over the next few months. After all, Oppenheim did say Apple would be “delivering state-of-the-art new products that our competitors aren’t going to be able to match,” and an incremental upgrade to Mac notebooks doesn’t seem to live up to that statement.
Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner, is putting his money on a touch-screen Mac tablet. Such a transition would be logical, he stated, since Apple already developed Cocoa Touch for iPhone — a toolkit for developing touchscreen-based interfaces, which could presumably be implemented into personal. This also makes sense in terms of the competition, since Dell, Nova and HP have long since offered their own, Windows-based tablet systems.
“The highest probability is [a tablet Mac] is what they’ll launch,” Dulaney stated in a phone interview.
Fortune magazine writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt thinks otherwise: a tablet Mac “would be a new product, not a product transition,” he notes in his column. He, too, bets on an overhaul for the MacBooks and MacBook Pros–just in time for when school goes back in session.
Any of these predictions can be correct, mainly because Oppenheim is tricky with his talk: First he gets us jazzed about new products by describing them as unmatchable and state-of-the-art, and then he blankets everything with the words “future product transition.”
Given the timing, I’m going to go with the more conservative guess: MacBooks and MacBook Pros running the Centrino 2 platform are the most likely new product to hit the market in the next few months. A touch-screen tablet Mac is likely further out on the horizon (because heck, if a teen can do it, so can Apple). That’s a product launch we’d be apt to see come January, 2009 at Macworld Expo.
(Photo credit: Yilka/Flickr)
Via [wired.com]
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