Recession hit desktop sales? Only partly...
December 16th 2008
A Wall Street Journal write up of fresh NPD data and prognostication by Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster has the blogsphere all a twitter--Apple's sales, specifically desktops, fell in the month of November and not by a little--a 35% sequential fall and a 1% drop over last year.
The Wall Street Journal paints a dark picture of Apple's failure to reduce overall prices and offer lower-cost models with the appropriate quotes and statistics to bolster their case.
However, there are a couple big things that neither the newspaper nor the analysts have taken into account: 1.) rumors of an iMac, Mac mini refresh dampened sales, 2.) by the time Apple issued its now famous 'no updates' statement, folks were already holding off purchases in anticipation of Black Friday, which by all accounts went quite well for Apple.
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How often does Apple, which conspicuously doesn't comment on its product plans or lack thereof, go out of its way and issue a public statement that rumors of a product refresh are false? Those rumors were killing sales.
In fact, a similar phenomenon hit MacBook sales in September ahead of a then "rumored" refresh. When that happened the sky hadn't fallen and it hasn't fallen today either.
That said, Shaw Wu, analyst, Kaufman Brothers, expects Apple to sell 2.7-million computers in the current quarter, a 17% increase from a year ago.
Did the bottom fall out of Apple's sales? Possibly. Has the recession put an end to Mac's bull run? Not likely...
What's your take?
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