Idiot!

The Intel transition will only help Apple's market share. Early reactions to Vista are a giant BFD. It's well-known that Vista is not much different from XP and is still plagued by The Registry, the playground of malware authors.

And as the buyers of new iPods levels off, veteran iPod owners will be buying replacement iPods, whether it is because their first ones broke or they like the new features on new models.

Stupid shallow analysis. Richard Farmer ought to pay attention to his name and hop on a tractor instead of slandering Apple.

If they don't see much upside potential for Apple, what did ML do for Microsoft?

It actually sounds pretty spot on. Apple will keep sell a lot of iPods but the huge growth will not continue. Only do I not think Vista will mean anything negative for the success of Apple.

Notice what ML is saying is that the current stock price reflects a very optimistic picture of Apples situation in 2007. To justify a higher stock price Apple has to exceed this optimism (the 40% figure for the iPod). And the stock is still in its low 50s. ML is predicting a growth up to the high 50s.

Apple is going to take a huge bite out of the Windows World when throngs of tired Dell owners buy Powerebooks in the next few years. Almost every person I know is buying a Mac as their next computer. If Ipod sales slow, it won't matter, because people are gonna be buyin computers like crazy. Also, I still know quite a few people who don't have an Ipod yet, and i get the feelin they're cruisin for a bruisin. (By which i mean they're gonna buy one)

You can never really trust analysts as they are there to help the financial institutions they work for, not Joe Public. They are not truly independant. How do we know that their company is not loading up on Apple stock as they talk the price down?

Also, if these guys really knew which way things were going they would be trading independantly on their own account rather than working for someone else.

The people surfing these boards know just as much about Apple, if not more than, the majority of the analysts. Their views should be taken with a pinch of salt.

I think he's right, from a prudent investor point of view.

The Intel transition is a huge gamble. If it pays off, Apple's market share could go to 25% or 30% - that's gigantic growth.

-- begin Apple fanboy opinion --
As an Apple fanboy, my expectation is that that will succeed. But I do recognize that buying Apple stock on those grounds is very risky. I also think that Vista will not be all that successful; each of MS's OS iterations has had less upgrade uptake than the last - people mostly only buy MS's OSs when they're preloaded. Very few people upgraded from 98 or 2000 to XP, and few people bought a new machine to get XP. Whether Vista will improve that depends on whether people perceive sufficient value in it, and my opinion is they won't: they'll see it as DRM-heavy, crushingly expensive, slow, bloated and buggy. Besides, it will still be late. We won't see it in 2006.
-- end Apple fanboy opinion --
(edit) one thing certain about Vista: It won't run a lot of older code, and device drivers will be hard to find, so that will also limit upgrading.