Katie MarsalOne of the biggest take-aways from Monday's Apple developer conference was the Mac maker's progress in unifying its user interface across multiple product lines, according to American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu.
At the same time, the analyst said he sees the company's decision to release Safari for Windows "as a strategic and smart move in giving Windows users a closer taste of the Mac experience in addition to iPod+iTunes and iPhone."
"We believe this will ultimately attract more switchers to the Apple franchise," he added.
In general, however, Wu joined fellow analysts over at PiperJaffray in calling Apple's Leopard-related announcements and secret features "somewhat underwhelming."
"Mac OS X Leopard will incorporate Boot Camp as a standard feature," he wrote. "While we believe this is positive in supporting Windows on a Mac, is it not a surprise and we believe the user community and investors were hoping that Apple would offer full virtual machine capability, allowing one to run Mac and Windows simultaneously."
Still, Wu remains bullish on Apple and its four-pronged product strategy, reiterating a "Buy" rating and $145 price target.
In his note to clients, the AmTech analyst also spoke optimistically about Electronic Art's return to the Mac gaming market.
"We find this development significant as the world's largest game developer is once again committing to the Mac platform," he wrote. "We believe other game developers could follow."
AppleInsider Staff
Malcolm Owen
Oliver Haslam
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William Gallagher
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64 Comments
So, now that he was completely and utterly wrong in his predictions for '07 (iPhone form factor, virtualization in Leopard) do you think Shaw will shy away from predictions and just make commentary like this: "More big name developers for Mac is good".
If Apple made it possible to run Windows apps alongside OSX, then developers would only develop for the Windows platform claiming all their software runs OSX.
Bad idea.
I never understood where this idea came from that Apple was going to put virtualization into Leopard. Not only was there the silly DigiTimes claim that Apple was delaying Leopard for this reason, but Wu and other financial analysts were saying the same thing.
Meanwhile, Phil Schiller was very clear that Apple's solution was Boot Camp and Apple even promoted Parallels on its web site.
Just goes to show how pure speculation takes on a life of its own and causes expectations to form, even when all evidence is to the contrary. Anyway, I am glad that everything is clear on this point now so that these analysts can stop yapping about it.
Bdj21ya, I disagree with you, and I agree with him.
While he may have gotten the physical situation wrong, his financial predictions have been good for the last few years.
This was a very underwhelming intro by Jobs. I was expecting some major information.
What happened to those ten secret features? We had maybe five that were not really all that major. The others we already knew about.
No information about the underpinnings of the OS. No word at all about ZFS. Nothing.
No hardware at all. This convention has taken on a look of a Macworld since the one here in New York/Boston has gone. We do expect to see something.
I never understood where this idea came from that Apple was going to put virtualization into Leopard. Not only was there the silly DigiTimes claim that Apple was delaying Leopard for this reason, but Wu and other financial analysts were saying the same thing.
Meanwhile, Phil Schiller was very clear that Apple's solution was Boot Camp and Apple even promoted Parallels on its web site.
Just goes to show how pure speculation takes on a life of its own and causes expectations to form, even when all evidence is to the contrary. Anyway, I am glad that everything is clear on this point now so that these analysts can stop yapping about it.
Unfortunately, everyone was saying it, even many posters here.
We simply can't take anything Apple says as being true until the time comes. Often, they deliberately mislead.