Miscellaneous Notes, November 24, 2015; Could Apple Watch Be Black Friday's Top Gift?

On November 18, 2015, I posted a short blurb on Xilinx, a computer chip company that has nothing to do with the Bakken. But the technology has always impressed me, just as Sprint technology impressed me.

Now today, Motley Fool has a long piece on Xilinx suggesting that Qualcomm and IBM like this company. There's also a close relationship between Apple and IBM.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment or financial decisions based on anything you read here or think you might have read here. 

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The Apple Page

Yahoo!Finance is reporting that Apple's iPhone and AppleWatch sales might surprise us.

This year there's a new contender, as IBM decided to throw the mighty weight of its Watson data analytics software service at the holiday prognistication problem.

Data scientists at IBM have set Watson loose reading millions of posts on thousands of social networks, blogs and web sites ahead of Black Friday in an effort to predict the hottest gifts of this gift-giving season. The big surprise so far? The top gift by far appears to be not a cute Star Wars robot or a talking Barbie doll but the Apple Watch, left for dead by analysts and panned by most reviewers.

If Watson is correct, Apple's holiday quarter could be a lot better than Wall Street expects. Analysts see Apple selling 76.5 million iPhones, up a paltry 3% from last year, along with an almost irrelevant 6 million of the new Apple watches, according to FactSet. At that level, the watch, which starts at $349, would bring in only about $2 billion to $3 billion, or maybe 5% of total revenue for the quarter.

One of the "things" about Apple users: after a few months, maybe six months, of buying a new Apple product, Apple users start looking for other hardware that links with, or is built specifically, for their new Apple product. "Everyone" now has a smartphone and watches are the next obvious piece of hardware to link with smartphones. At $349 for a basic watch, it is a product that is not out of reach for almost anyone able to afford a smartphone. Laptops/tablets are not in the same sphere as the smartphone, but smartphones and watches are joined at the hip, literally and figuratively.