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Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) shares took a hit Monday, getting pounded down to US$220.35 before recovering back up to $224.55 at close Tuesday. One of the big questions AAPL investors seem to be asking themselves right now is how much faith they have in the iPad.
For his part, Brian Marshall of Broadpoint Amtech seems to be among the optimists. "I'm raising my estimate for calendar year 2010 sales of the iPad from 2.2 million units to four million," he told MacNewsWorld.
"My estimated earnings per share level for calendar year 2010 is now $12.75, up from $12," he added.
The team at Investor Village's AAPL Sanity Board estimated that nearly 120,000 iPads were sold in pre-orders on the first day.
The methodology, though, appears to be far from scientific -- the team extrapolated from a base of 99 pre-orders for 110 iPads (meaning some people ordered more than one) over 19.5 hours and did some creative math.
However, Marshall thinks more than 50,000 would have been pre-ordered the first day. "I expect a minimum of 850,000 iPads to be sold in the June quarter," he pointed out.
Apple began taking pre-orders March 12, so that makes for a total of 110 days. That means Apple should sell at least 7,727 iPads a day to meet Marshall's expectations.
Go where the money is, folks; remember that consumers vote with their wallets.
Thinking Ahead
Apple has sound reasons to announce its iPad replacement policy before consumers get their hot little hands on the device. For one thing, this may forestall any complaints buyers may theoretically have about the iPad's battery not being able to hold its charge (which is what the policy covers).
For another, it raises the bar for the competition. The iPad synchs automatically to users' Macs or PCs through the docking cable it will come with, said Carl Howe, director of anywhere consumer research at the Yankee Group. It also gets automatically backed up once you connect it to your computer.
"Windows tablets are standalone computers, and if you lose them, you lose everything in them," Howe told MacNewsWorld. "Even if the vendor were to give you a brand new tablet, you'd spend the next two days reinstalling your apps, which you won't have to do with the iPad."
That might be a strong argument for people to purchase an iPad rather than any of the many tablet devices running Windows 7 expected to hit the market soon. Recall that tablet devices will be streaming in over the next few months. Manufacturers will flood the market with tablet PCs toward the end of the second quarter and the beginning of the third, Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, told MacNewsWorld.
Investors should find this reassuring.
Riding the Wall Street Wave
More good news emerged this past week: Apple has exceeded $200 billion in market capitalization -- Tuesday's figure exceed $203 billion. This puts it in third place among publicly listed American companies, behind market leader Exxon and runner-up Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT).
In doing so, it displaced Berkshire Hathaway and Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT).
Meanwhile, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster dubbed 2010 the "Year of the Mac" in a research note on Tuesday. He relied on figures from the NPD Group showing Mac sales were up 43 percent in February, following a 36 percent jump in January. Munster estimates Apple will sell up to 2.9 million Macs in this quarter.
Meanwhile, iPod sales are also on the increase.
Add to this the news that the iPhone gained some market share in the U.S. smartphone market in January, according to comScore, and it seems Apple's future is fairly robust. In fact, the whisper is that Cupertino is headed for yet another record quarter.
Taking Care of Business
Apple's efforts to penetrate the enterprise market, meanwhile, may get a boost following its recent patching of 16 security 
vulnerabilities in its Safari browser. Twelve of these could let an attacker execute code remotely on a victim's machine and take it over.
Security is always a concern among business users.
Interestingly, the patches come two weeks ahead of the Pwn2Own 2010 hacking challenge, to be held during CanSecWest Vancouver 2010. Hackers have repeatedly cracked the Mac's security at previous Pwn2Own challenges, developments that inevitably caused no small amount of controversy regarding the fortitude of Mac OS X relative to Windows and Linux. The coming challenge should be interesting.
More importantly, the patch indicates Apple is acknowledging security vulnerabilities, an attitude that could appeal to the business community.
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