Apple is due to announce Wednesday its earnings for the quarter that ended June 27, and you know what that means: wild speculation by analysts followed by pouting and a drooping stock price when Apple out-performs expectations.
But lately, it’s gotten still more insane: now, these same analysts are trying to infer some read of the overall economic condition based on Apple’s earnings. Which, to me, is a comically fruitless exercise, because Apple operates in a different universe from most companies. It has radically differentiated offerings in all of its businesses, and its focus on innovation is such that it always comes out with a new market-defining product that the rest of the industry can’t match. Apple’s an especially bad indicator of the rest of the consumer tech sector during this recession. Apple doing well doesn’t mean that Dell’s in good shape, or vice versa.
BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl, a long-time Apple-watcher, has a very sober account of this lunacy, which suffers from the problems associated with a lot of traditional business reporting — in pursuit of balance, he can’t actually address the questionable premise that Apple, a company that was out-performing the market before it collapsed, might signify the end of the recession by continuing to out-perform the market.
I can say this much: Apple will have great earnings on Wednesday. And that means that it remains good to be an Apple stockholder, even as the rest of the world is in chaos. It doesn’t mean we’re getting back to normal anywhere else.
