The One Huge Fact Nobody Will See Coming From Apple Tonight
Over the last six months, I’ve watched on with interest as everybody from tech pundits to financial analysts wrote Apple off as a company. The innovation is gone they say. Margins are decreasing, Samsung is the new Apple, there won’t be a TV, there will be three iPhones this year.
It blows my mind that people can get away with printing all sorts of rubbish while basing it mostly on fiction. Apple has possibly its strongest product line up ever and has spoken only twice during the last quarter (Opening iPad mini weekend sales and iPhone 5 opening weekend sales in China). During that time, the stock has fallen 30% and people are lining up to write the company off.
Ahead of the earnings announcement this evening, I’m going to make one big prediction that is coming up. I’ll start off by saying its big products like iPhones, Macs and iPads will be marginally ahead of predictions; 50 odd million iPhones sold in the quarter. What I want to focus on is what I see as a huge breakout product for Apple: The iPad Mini.
Breaking Into The Mainstream
The sales numbers that it’s going to deliver on this thing will be off the charts as the shops can’t keep them in stock. Now you can say the same about the Surface from Microsoft and the Nexus 7 from Google, but we are taking different universes in terms of numbers. I’m going to make a wild call and say that Apple will sell between 15-20 million iPad minis in the first quarter it was ever on sale. This is going to be the big story tonight!
Never have I seen such a mainstream consumer reaction to a product and it is going to catch all the pundits and analysts with their pants down. This thing is only getting started as well and I fully expect it to become one of Apple’s most important products this year. As I said when I reviewed the device, it is my favorite Apple product ever, and I would go as far as saying that it might kill the larger iPad over time.
While the pundits focus on shrinking margins and lack of innovation, they are missing the point. Apple has never been scared to shrink, revamp or iterate on a product. It’s also never been afraid to kill products or radically change them as we see all the time with the iPod.
So that’s all I have to say. Apple certainly face a tougher world, but later tonight, you’ll all be reading stories about the iPad Mini being a massive success. The same iPad Mini that we were all told was too expensive, too small, too late and too unoriginal.
I need to give a full disclosure that I’ve invested heavily in Apple stock and what I’ve come to find with its share price is that analysts and the general public don’t have a clue. The products it releases aims to make money and have mass market appeal, and when it comes to that, it tends to be Apple who knows best.
