Apple To Offer Dealers Inventory Clearing Power Mac & Power Book Promo

According to anonymous sources, Apple will begin offering dealers an instant $100 price-cut on all Power Macintosh and PowerBook computers ordered from the computer maker beginning today. The promo will not be publicly announced, and will run through the 29th of the month. Since the promo is exclusively between the Apple and their authorized dealers, it will be up to the dealer to pass the savings on to the consumer, or decide to keep the additional $100 from each unit as company profit. As mentioned above, this is not a cash back promo and does not apply to current dealer inventory.

This dealer promotion is the company's way of trying to ship as much product for the fiscal quarter ending June 30th, while helping to reduce inventory and boost revenues. The executive decision stems from the expected financial shortcomings for the current quarter, and not as a means to clear product inventory for new product introductions. As a side note, there will be no new PowerBook G4 announcements at the semiannual MacWorld trade show in New York next month.

"They [Apple] are very eager to undo some of the damage that resulted from the lower-than-expected revenues announcement made earlier in the week," an insider told SlapTech.com correspondents this weekend. Over the past weeks, Apple representatives were instructed to pressure dealers to provide the company with figures detailing how many units they plan to order by the end of the month, and consequently, the fiscal quarter.

"We received numerous e-mails and phone calls from our Apple representative over the span of a couple of days last week," claims one source with ties to an Apple Authorized Dealer. "They've never done this before, and are very persistent." Apparently, Apple is seeking these figures in a hurry to help calculate inventory and revenue reports for the quarter, which they hope the $100 promotion will improve.

Apple stock dropped nearly 15% in trading this week, following the company's lower revenue warnings.