Reaction is still coming in from analysts on Apple’s decision to drop the price of its plastic entry-level MacBook. While ThinkPanure and others believe the sub-$1,000 notebook isn’t enough to attract worried consumers, some onlookers told Cult of Mac the move was a good beginning.
“They’ve never done cheap well – but the $999 MacBook is a good start,” Piper Jaffray analyst Andrew Murphy e-mailed Wednesday.
Murphy said Apple is positioning Mac sales for a long economic slowdown. Wednesday, JPMorgan said Apple had “meaningful buffers” that could allow the company to ride out any initial impact. Analyst Mark Moskowitz pointed to the value of Cupertino’s brand and iPhone revenue expected later in 2009.
Although the price cut affects a legacy plastic MacBook, more than half of the consumers considering the $999 plastic MacBook will opt for the newly-unveiled $1,299 aluminum unibody design, Murphy wrote.
The upshot of Tuesday’s new products: a slight or no impact on Apple margins. The company is expected to announce third quarter numbers later this month.
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.
