Financial Analysis Of Apple Inc.

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 a ...
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