Jobs Blows Off the Next Three Months!

If you haven't heard the Apple Q4 Financial Earnings Conference Call, go listen to it ASAP and listen very carefully to Steve Jobs.

Yes, that's right. Jobs himself was on the call. Unless you've been inolved in these calls over a long period of time like we have, you have no idea how unusual that is. Apple's CFO, Fred Anderson, has always done these calls solo.

Listen to how poorly Jobs reads from his script. Again, very unusal. Have you ever seen Jobs read from a script at any Keynote?

Jobs' involvement was obviously thrown together at the last minute, probably to help stop the bleeding. But, for those of you watching the stock head south faster than Canadians in the winter, it's not going to help in the short term.

But it also means that for those of you smart enough to take advantage of it, Apple's stock is at a great price right now. Investors are running scared and completely forgetting the stock market dictum of "Buy low, sell high."

Psychologically, Apple's stock price can't get much lower. All the analysts who rated Apple a "buy" at 50 are now having to explain to their bosses why it's a "neutral" at 20. Once they've had the opportunity to digest what Jobs told them during the conference call, they'll be back on board.

Apple's stock won't go below 15 and will begin rising by the end of the month. Looking into our crystal ball, we see Apple hovering around $30 through mid-December, when it will begin its traditional run up to Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

Everything that Jobs and Anderson said points to the fact that Apple has already given up on the Christmas season. Sure, they'll sell lots of Macs but revenue will be down and they won't hit previosuly announced targets. But it gets better.

Jobs himself, the King of Rumor Haters, dropped a bunch of bombshells on the analysts.

1) Apple will offer lower cost Cube models by next spring (MacCentral)

2) We'll have the best product line I've seen in my career [next year] (AppleLinks)

3) Apple was working closely with [Motorola] and would begin to close the ["megahertz"] gap within six months. (MacNN)

4) Jobs said Apple plans to release "more iMovie-like applications" that merge powerful capabilities with the Mac's traditional ease of use. (ZDNet)

All of this means one thing to people looking to buy Macs in the next couple of months....

WAIT!

Apple has already said they are going to have a bad quarter in the next three months but they will do their best. What that means is that they'll be slashing prices harder and faster than a used car salesman at the end of the month. Coming up on Christmas, there are going to be some great deals out there on Cubes and G4s.

And, if you can wait four to six months, it looks like Apple's pipeline will be full of cool new products (new Cube configurations, faster G4's and, dare we say it, a new G4 PowerBook!).

It may not look like it, but this is a fantastic time to be an Apple investor and, in the next few months, an Apple customer.

Until next time, Loose Cannons Out!

cannons@applelinks.com