Quote:
Originally Posted by
macnyc 
Exactly!
As an Apple shareholder, I'm really getting tired of these supply issues. I'm not sure if Tim Cook is being way too careful about over-production or what, but if he continues like this it's going to bite Apple in the ass.
Apple is damn lucky that Motorola, RIM and Samsung have stumbled so badly with their tablets. If they hadn't you would have had tons of people flocking to them, the same as with the Android phones.
Tim, get your act together on supply!
Tim is the very BEST Operations guy in the world! He is to logistics what Jobs is to product(s) vision and direction.
Tim actually addressed this during the CC when asked how production could go from 7M+ last quarter to less than 5 this quarter. His simple answer was something to the effect that multi-million production transitions are NON TRIVIAL with a delicate balancing act of product announcement, retooling, inventory draw-down and new product ramping.... a VERY difficult dance indeed.
He does this better than ANYONE and has for YEARS. He went on to say they
DO have the manufacturing capabilities in place and are confident of achieving previous run rates and then some.
This is why they are NOT delaying any country roll-outs and, in fact, continue on a torrid expansion of distribution world wide.
I know of NO ONE I would rather have running my operations than TC....do you??
Bottom line, I predict 9+ million units sold in Q3.
BTW, did you notice that (just yesterday afternoon right before their earnings announcement) the lead time on new iPad2 orders from Apple's site fell to 1-2 weeks from 3-4.
So, do not worry grasshopper and let's hope TC stays with Apple for the rest of his career.
From
http://www.macworld.com/article/1593...ranscript.htmlQuote:
.....the iPad has the mother of all backlogs that we’re working very, very hard to get out to customers as quickly as we can.
Product transitions are never simple, and as you can probably appreciate, we are in a position that we have to call them for many, many weeks in advance, in terms of how many of the current product we want to produce and the dates at which we will announce the new product.
We drew the channel down on the original iPad by 570,000 units during the quarter, and we added at the end of the quarter 170,000 of the new iPad 2s, although most of that was in transit at the end of the quarter. And so the net reduction was 400,000 and so our sell through was above five million for the quarter. And again, this has to be planned quite a ways in the future.
Just to remind you, we sent out an invitation to the [iPad 2 launch] event toward the end of February, we had the event in early March, we placed the unit on sale in the United States on March 11, and our quarter ended about 2 weeks thereafter. So, there was some expectation of a new product, and we would have obviously factored that into our thinking about the product transition, as we planned the number of the original unit to build.
So I think the key point here is that I’m extremely pleased with the progress we’ve been making on the manufacturing ramp. We have gotten off to a materially better start and produced a lot more units than we did on the original ramp of the first iPad, and we’re so confident with our ability to supply that we’ve already put on 25 additional countries at the end of March, and we’ll be placing on 13 more next week, and we’ll do even more as we step through the quarter.
All emphasis is mine.
