PCs

The long knives at Apple: What the experts are saying

Forstall and Browett are out. Ive, Cue, Mansfield and Federighi pick up the slack

FORTUNE: While the fourth estate was preoccupied with a hurricane and Wall Street was closed due to flooding, Apple (AAPL) announced a major shuffling of its executive team Monday.

Here's how some leading Apple watchers told the story overnight:

Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster: Apple Consolidates Management Around Core Players. "Yesterday Apple announced top level management changes, most notably Scott Forstall head of MORE

Apple's hit-and-miss report: What analysts are saying (u)

Most see a silver lining, despite disappointing Q4's earnings and troubling Q1 guidance

FORTUNE -- The earnings report Apple (AAPL) issued Thursday evening was complicated one, and analysts on Friday -- like voters in the U.S. Presidential election -- were trying to thread the needle between hope and disappointment.

Excerpts from their notes to clients:

UPDATE: Another wave arrived Friday afternoon. New ones on top.

Sterne Agee's Shaw Wu: Rare EPS Miss But Would MORE

Apple's Q4: Michael Walkley called it; the indies miss again

For the third time in five quarters, the professional analysts outgunned the amateurs

FORTUNE -- It was a great story while it lasted.

For nearly three years the professional sell-side analysts who cover Apple (AAPL) for the big banks and brokerage houses got clobbered every quarter by a motley group of amateurs -- bloggers, day traders and individual investors who bet on Apple to beat the Street's consensus and hadn't been wrong MORE

Apple Q4 earnings beat guidance, miss the Street's lowered expectations

Reports $36 billion in revenue, $8.2 billion profit and $8.67 earnings per share

FORTUNE -- Apple's (AAPL) reported mixed results Thursday. Although its sales of nearly $36 billion beat both its guidance and Wall Street's estimates, its earnings came up slightly short.

At $8.67 per share, they were higher than the company's usual conservative guidance of $7.05. But they were less than the $8.75 Wall Street was expecting -- and that number had MORE

Analysts cautious ahead of Apple's earnings release

Lowered expectations after Tim Cook's Tuesday bombshell

FORTUNE -- On Monday, Wall Street's consensus for Apple's (AAPL) fourth quarter report -- scheduled to be released today after the markets close -- was for earnings of $8.85 on sales of $36.32 billion.

By Thursday, according to Thomson Financial, those numbers had dropped to $8.75 and $35.8 billion. And among some of the analysts who revised their estimates this week, expectations were even lower.

What MORE

Handicapping Apple's quarterly revenue and earnings: Q4 2012

Revenue estimates range from $34.26 billion to $42.83 billion, EPS from $7.90 to $11.32

NOTE: When Tim Cook announced Tuesday that iPad unit sales hit 100 million about two weeks ago, many analysts revised their numbers downward. Those changes are not reflected in the data that follow. For updated numbers, see Analysts cautious ahead of Apple's earnings.

FORTUNE -- Something interesting happened this quarter when we polled the small army of analysts -- MORE

In dismal quarter for PCs, Apple's Macs could shine

Windows sales fell 8-9% year over year, but most analysts think Mac's actually grew

FORTUNE -- Last quarter was a terrible for most personal computer makers. With sales down 8%-9% across the board, yearly PC shipments fell worldwide for the first time since the 2001 recession according to Gartner and IDC, which attributed the dismal results variously to the economic slowdown, a pause in advance of Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows 8 and the MORE

What Romney and Obama said about Apple's iPhone jobs

Q: How do you convince a great American company to bring that manufacturing back?

FORTUNE -- Toward the end of the second presidential debate, moderator Candy Crowley asked Mitt Romney and Barack Obama about Apple (AAPL).

"iPad, the Macs, the iPhones, they are all manufactured in China," she began. "One of the major reasons is labor is so much cheaper [there]. How do you convince a great American company to bring that manufacturing back here?"

GOVERNOR MORE

iPhone 5, Mac concerns lead to lowered Apple estimates

Already this week three analysts have trimmed their forecasts for fiscal Q4

FORTUNE -- When Apple (AAPL) is about to release its quarterly earnings we usually see analysts scrambling to raise their estimates so as not to get sandbagged by numbers that were better than they could have imagined.

But with the company set to report fiscal Q4 results next Thursday Oct. 25, we're seeing the opposite. Three analysts trimmed their estimates MORE

Apple's surprise-free iPhone 5 launch: How Mr. Market reacted

Were traders watching the live blogs? You be the judge.

FORTUNE -- How does Apple's (AAPL) share price respond to a high-profile media event in which there are few surprises?

You can read too much into a chart like the one above, but it suggests that Mr. Market was:

Disappointed with the unsurprising name of the new iPhone
Pleased with the engineering specs and other details as they unfolded
Lost interest during the rehashing MORE