Apple Inc. shares continued to take a pounding for a second straight day Wednesday, with investors and some industry analysts expressing disappointment with Apple"s latest announcements at the annual Macworld Expo.
Apple"s stock cut its losses, but was still down by $7.47, or 4.4%, to trade at $161.66 in afternoon action, adding to the previous session"s losses in which the stock gave up more than 5%.
Part of the reason for the decline was attributed to concerns about Intel Corp."s disappointing outlook, as Apple exclusively uses Intel processors in its line of Macintosh PCs.
At Bernstein Research, analyst Toni Sacconaghi said that the product announcements were largely as expected, "if not modestly below expectations," and called the MacBook Air release one of the highlights of Jobs" speech.
But he commented that despite the uniqueness of the MacBook Air -- the laptop has a 13.3-inch screen and a full keyboard, measures just 0.76 inches at its thickest point and doesn"t include an optical drive -- he believes the new notebook won"t do much for expanding the market for the Macintosh.
Sacconaghi also said that with the MacBook Air compromising such hardware items as the optical drive and only having one USB port, he sees the laptop as " competing primarily with other Mac notebooks" and will be targeted at consumers. Because of this, the analyst believes the MacBook Air won"t extend Apple"s offerings into new market segments.