Steven Fortuna Quotations

We had been looking for 13 percent unit growth and 8 percent average unit price expansion owing to iBook and higher-priced iMacs, ... The company delivered 12 percent unit growth and only 3.5 percent average unit price expansion.

Hurd continues to realize cost savings well ahead of plan.

Last night, Apple pre-announced a massive shortfall in expected revenue for the current quarter as well as for the remainder of the fiscal year. This does not come as a surprise to us, although the magnitude of the shortfall surpassed even our low expectations, ... We believe it is important to note that we have been much more negative regarding the Apple story than the Street consensus over the past several months.

We are cutting our revenue and earnings forecasts for Compaq due to a clearly slowing consumer market for PCs -- an area that has been responsible for a significant amount of the company's recent top-line growth -- the likelihood of increased pricing pressure from Dell on the corporate side, and fears related to economic uncertainty.

While November (pre-Thanksgiving) did see a sequential increase in weekly (telephone sales) call volumes, we believe it was slightly below expectations.

Dell has stated that a focus for them has been to gain share in Europe vs. HP, particularly in servers. We believe that Dell is indeed making progress to close the gap and Dell's declining tax rate implies improving operational profitability in the region.

Impressively, according to management, 45 percent of iMac customers were first-time buyers of Apple products. While we think this number could be high, clearly it points to the strength of the company's products as well as it potential to drive share gains through further expansion into the consumer market.