Apple Forecasts: Not Just Hype

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A phone that runs on faster 3G networks is a lock for 2008 and should hit the market no later than June. If its existence isn't confirmed by March or April (Jobs may opt not to discuss it at Macworld for fear of depressing sales for a few months), this will be the first sign of trouble.

New Mobile Devices?

The rumor mills are churning about two mobile computing products: a thinner, lighter notebook and a tablet. A shakeup in notebooks has to happen, as Apple hasn't seriously revised its high-end notebook designs since before the transition to using chips from Intel (INTC) in 2005. The MacBook Pro, in particular, and the PowerBook before it have had essentially the same metallic look and feel (titanium, then aluminum) since about 2001.

As much as I love my MacBook Pro, competitors such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and—dare I say it—Dell (DELL) have learned Apple's lessons well and are looking far less shabby when compared with a Mac than before. Consumers are still intrigued by notebooks that are thinner and lighter than Macs tend to be. An ultraportable MacBook Mini would be a great product.

Additional speculation concerns a tablet, a handheld that would either be a super-compact Mac with a touch-enabled screen or some kind of satellite device designed to interface with a Mac through a remote wireless connection. Normally I'd dismiss both, but Apple's innovative multitouch-screen technology, found on the iPhone and the iPod Touch, makes the concept not only plausible but attractive, assuming the feature set and price are right.

Wave of Brick-and-Mortar Buyers

Both would go a long way toward attracting disaffected Windows users, the so-called switchers, who've had it with Windows (MSFT) stupidity. The number of "new to Mac" consumers at Apple's retail stores around the world continues to hover at around 50%. The retail stores moved 1.4 million of the 7 million Macs sold last year, meaning 700,000 were sold to people who were new to the platform.

Assuming this number remains within the 50% range, the number of new Mac users could grow considerably. Apple finished its fourth fiscal quarter with 197 stores, and 40 more are expected during 2008, including one in Beijing that will open in time for the Olympics. The average Apple store saw 12,500 visitors per week in the fourth quarter, for a total of 31 million visits to all stores during the period. Assuming that weekly pace continues through the year, Apple can expect to see nearly 3 million store visits per week across its entire retail footprint in 2008. That's more than 150 million visits in total for the year.

Numbers like that make Neff's prediction that Apple will sell 8.8 million Macs in 2008 seem pretty solid. All told, he's expecting sales of $32.5 billion in 2008 and north of $39 billion in 2009. Ten years ago, during Apple's darkest days, who would have predicted that?

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.