Rumor Roundup: Things that make you go 'Hmmm'
10% of owners of iPhone 5 & up will buy an Apple Watch, predicts Morgan Stanley (9to5 Mac)
Source: some analyst
Chance it's true: 30 percent at most
Morgan Stanley joins the fray of analysts desperate to be FIRST! to predict sales for a product that hasn't even shipped yet. Left unexplained in this article is why a bunch of analyst tea-leaf reading about a product with no firm shipping date qualifies as anything even close to real news.
Foxconn investing $2.6B into new display factory that will exclusively supply Apple (AppleInsider)
Source: "People familiar with the matter"
Chance it's true: 50/50
It all sounds plausible enough on the surface, but the source of this report (Bloomberg) apparently yanked all reference from Apple in the headline after the fact, which definitely makes one grab one's chin and mutter, "Hmmmm."
Strong demand for iPhone 6 & 6 Plus persists, prompts Piper Jaffray to raise Apple price target to $135 (AppleInsider)
Source: Analyst Gene "Dude, where's my Apple HDTV?" Munster
Chance it's true: none
Gene Munster is notorious for two things: years of inaccurate predictions about an Apple HDTV, and years of inaccurate predictions about Apple's supply chain, sales, financial performance... basically, if it has to do with Apple, he's gotten it wrong. Along with Brian "iRing" White and Peter Misek, he's among an elite cadre of analysts whose predictions I never, ever take seriously.
KGI: Apple to sell over 71M iPhones in holiday quarter, followed by sub-50M to start 2015 (9to5 Mac)
Source: "Accurate" analyst Ming-Chi Kuo
Chance it's true: 40 percent
It'll be interesting to revisit these numbers later on to find out how far off the mark this "accurate" analyst turns out to be. Not only that, I'm interested to see how far into 2015 we'll get before his prediction of Apple ceasing sales of the iPhone 5c turns out to be correct. My prediction: September or so. Right around the time the iPhone 5-based guts of the 5c get replaced with guts based on the 5s.
Mmm, guts. Must be almost time for Thanksgiving...
