Apple shares declined a whopping 6.33% today, possibly on rumors that sales for new macs might be hampered by a lag from software developers to switch to the Intel (INTC) platform, as well as news that CBS will be bypassing iTunes and will provide direct downloads of the show Survivor.
I have been watching the decline on intraday trading today trying to figure out why the sudden selloff - but I could find no major coverage on either one of the above possible explanations on the regular sources, among them the Dow Jones newswire, which only covered the CBS story.
The Survivor news might reflect a reasonable fear that the iTunes dominance might be short lived; I find that unlikely:
- Survivor is the only show with which CBS is experimenting with direct downloads; it looks like its iTunes for everything else.
- iTunes’ revenue is still primarily music, to the best of my knowledge.
- People are used to iTunes; it’s easy, highly available and accessible, and works well with the iPod.
As far as the Intel switch goes, it looks like the primary concern was Adobe. This is nonsense; Adobe must have been waiting for years for this switch. Its products sell well for Macs, but they sell the very same identical products for Windows. Eliminating the PPC support will allow Adobe and all the companies that sell for both platforms to consolidate their codebases. This is easier than you might think - worst case, they can run their software under an emulated mode, and speed concerns might not be an issue since the Intel processors are, if you were to believe the hype, 4 times faster than their PPC `equivalents’.Let’s consider the other end on the other hand. The move to Intel allows a myriad software providers to publish on the Mac. Should things work as planned, we could see PC games being ported to the Mac, allowing Apple to tap a whole new market that has been ignored for years.
This entry was posted
on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 8:16 pm and is filed under software, computer science, finance.
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