The Daily Swarm

Last week Apple’s shares tumbled nearly 20pc after two analysts downgraded the stock on fears that the consumer spending slowdown could seriously hit future profits.
While many company founders would steer well clear of commenting on valuations, Mr Wozniak says the downgrade was “correct”: an admission which could wipe further millions of the shares which have fallen by from a high of $179 in August to just over $100 on the close last week.
In fact he believes: “It is time for the whole computer industry to maybe have a bit of a slowdown. For twenty years we have been in this replacement and upgrade market,” he says. “It is very easy to postpone that when there are financial irregularities.”

He says investment houses’ over-valuation of web 2.0 and social networking websites could even lead to a minor version of the dotcom crash which saw $5 trillion wiped of the market values of technology companies between March 2000 and October 2002.

I begin to wonder whether he was even briefed by the Apple press office when he predicts the imminent death of the company’s most popular product, the iPod.

“The iPod has sort of lived a long life at number one,” he says. “Things like, that if you look back to transistor radios and Walkmans, they kind of die out after a while.

“It’s kind of like everyone has got one or two or three. You get to a point when they are on display everywhere, they get real cheap and they are not selling as much.”