Apple is relatively unscathed by the recent Thailand flooding which threw for a loop PC makers more dependent on hard drives. That’s the word from Wall Street analysts who say Apple’s move to flash memory saved the Cupertino, Calif tech giant from the fate of Intel.
Intel stock dropped 4.8 percent earlier this week on word sales by the giant chipmaker would be down until at least through the first quarter of the 2012 financial year. PC makers have been rushing to buy up scarce hard drive supplies after the July Thailand flooding. Thailand is the No. 2 global producer of hard drives.
“We think Apple will be the least impacted … if at all, given its ability to sell MacBook Airs and iPads,” Barclays Capital analyst Ben Reitzes noted Tuesday night. PC sales in the fourth quarter are forecast to grow by only 4 percent, with 3.6 percent annual growth predicted for the first quarter of fiscal 2012.
As we reported earlier this month, Apple was forced to delay some Mac orders for up to seven weeks due to the shortage of hard drives larger than two terabytes. A rush of solid-state drive orders are happening as PC makers try to adjust to about half of Thailand’s hard drive plants shutting due to the summer flood.
All of which puts into perspective Apple’s recent $500 million acquisition of Israel-based Anobit. Anobit’s technology is used by Apple’s iPad, iPhone and MacBook Air.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
5 responses to “Apple Yawns At The Hard Drive Shortage Paralyzing The Rest Of The PC Industry [Analyst]”
Well it could also be related to their small marketshare, if they have just as many hard drives in storage as all the other manufacturers it would last them a lot longer… just saying :p
Nobody keeps much in the way of components in storage. It’s called just in time manufacturing and everyone pretty much does it now. THey just don’t have as many products that are dependent on HDD, so it has less impact on the blended bottom line
LMAO! Bloggers & “phony” journalists are just now realizing Apple has a hefty stockpile of components! lol
Everyone except Apple! They order components for the devices they will DEFINITELY sell! Therefore, they can order a lot more then they need!
Apple is the biggest ripoff company in human history. Sure it had some good ideas but the ipad is a toy with insufficient storage and marginal video capability. Its no different than clothing stores that markup their clothes 300 percent so that certain insecure individuals will think they are special when they buy them. Its a great study in the herd mentality of the mentally weak.