Will Apple Upstage The Palm Pre At Next Week’s WWDC?
Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster warned in a research note this morning that he fears Apple’s big Worldwide Developers Conference that kicks off Monday in San Francisco could be a “slight disappointment” to investors, Fortune reports.
To be sure, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) will have a hard act to follow. Last night, the most highly regarded gadget reviewers in the industry unleashed a torrent of positive Palm Pre prose. What’s more, they pretty much came to the conclusion that the Pre is so good, it may end Apple’s reign as the coolest device on the market. So, what could Apple announce on Monday to beat that?
Apple has been mum on its plans, but that hasn’t stopped others from speculating. Mostly, people expect small software updates, like an internal compass, and new hardware updates like more or less capacity. Whether new phones are coming, however, is even up for debate. Walt Mossberg wrote in his Palm Pre review yesterday that “A new, improved iPhone is expected to be announced on June 8.” If there’s no phone, then what will wow the crowd? In a BusinessWeek article yesterday, the author said the Palm (NSDQ: PALM) will likely fail for a number of reasons, one of which is that it will be upstaged on Monday by Apple in San Francisco, where Steve Jobs is likely to make a surprise appearance.
But Munster has his own reasons for believing Apple won’t be successful in getting the oohs and ahhs that former year’s presentations have drawn. Specifically, he says, even if new phones are unveiled, they won’t hit the market until mid-July (giving the Pre a healthy headstart), and that if prices come down, they won’t be as much as everyone expects. A new iPhone will probably be $150, not $99, and AT&T (NYSE: T) will only adjust their data plans by around 25 percent, he wrote. In a separate note, Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner expects even a more worse case scenario—that Apple will delay the announcement of new iPhones for a few weeks in order to sell out of the old iPhones.
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