Piper Jaffray AAPL stock forecast bumped up to $299

According to AppleInsider, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster expects Apple's stock to hit US$299 by the end of the year.

When Apple revealed that it had sold 50 million iPhones at the iPhone OS 4 event, the analyst realized that meant at least 6.9 million iPhones were sold in the March quarter, and that's a conservative estimate. With those numbers in mind, Munster predicts that Apple will sell 7.5 million iPhones in 2010's first quarter. That figure would represent an impressive 93 percent year-over-year growth in iPhone sales. Note that Apple realized a 90 percent increase y/y last quarter.

As a result, Munster has bumped his predicted end-of-year price of AAPL up from $287 to $299 per share. Meanwhile, Munster also raised his Q1 Mac sales estimates from 2.6 million to 2.9 million. Take his numbers with your choice of salt grain size, as he did shank the iPad launch estimate pretty badly with a last-minute bump in expected sales.

Apple reports quarterly earnings on April 20th, and we'll be covering the analyst conference call as we always do.