Red flags in the distance for Apple?

Apple beat analysts' estimates for revenues and profits in the company's fourth quarter, but there are some red flags on the horizon. Sales of Macs fell below analysts' expectations, only by 100 to 150 thousand units, but enough to question whether the recent MacBook and MacBook Pro refreshes will be enough to get the company's momentum back. Of more concern is good news that could turn out to be bad news. Sales of 3G iPhones smashed analysts' expectations, with 6.89 million sold vs. 5 million forecast by analysts. The potential problem is that Apple records the sales when the phones are shipped to its service provider customers, not when those operators sell them to subscribers. The original iPhone was rolled out slowly to service providers worldwide, but the 3G iPhone went out to mobile phone operators in almost 50 countries at the same time. Operators could have "stuffed" their warehouses with iPhones in anticipation of heavy demand that may not have materialized.

The proof will be in the next quarter, where Apple is already projecting sales considerably lower than analysts' estimates. It may be that Apple's simply managing expectations, or it may be a sign of real problems ahead.

Apple: Good news, bad news and no news

Apple announced its updated MacBooks and MacBook Pros yesterday. Here's my take on the announcements:

• No news: With very few exceptions, everything that Apple announced yesterday had already been leaked in detail. There was a time when Apple could keep secrets. No more.
  
  
• Bad news: Even with the LED backlit displays, multitouch-enabled touchpads without mouse buttons and cases carved out of a single block of aluminum, there was little in yesterday's announcement to generate excitement. Despite switching to Nvidia chip sets and graphics controllers, the performance of the MacBooks and MacBook Pros still lags behind that of comparably priced notebooks from other manufacturers.
   
• Good news: Steve Jobs shared the stage with COO Tim Cook and head of design Jonathan Ive. As I wrote about earlier this month, one way for Apple to avoid manipulation of its stock price through rumors about Steve Jobs's health is to demonstrate that it has a strong management team. The company is starting to do that.

One has to be concerned about the direction that Apple's new product development is taking. There's a real sense of incremental improvement in the iPhone, iPods and now the MacBooks. The last earth-shaking announcement was the original iPhone, which feels like it occurred decades ago. I hope that we'll see something really new, not just improved, soon.