Apple's Changing the Game -- Again

Apple's (AAPL - commentary - Cramer's Take) got something that I don't see much of in this market -- a lack of supply. Stock supply. Other than in Salesforce.com (CRM - commentary - Cramer's Take) and maybe Research In Motion (RIMM - commentary - Cramer's Take), there just aren't a lot of sellers at these levels. It's as if everyone who wanted to sell is totally spooked out of selling by the strength in the stock after a not-great quarter, or because they see the new product cycles and are willing to bet they trump iPod weakness (which may not even be that weak if you believe that some of that $600 rebate is going to find its way to Apple stores, as I think it will).

What do people see in Apple? Honestly, I think they are still puzzling over the strength in that old warhorse Macintosh line. They aren't talking to kids -- the key to the iPod success. They don't seem to recognize the genius of iChat, which has simply outmoded Hewlett-Packard (HPQ - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Dell (DELL - commentary - Cramer's Take) and anyone else who makes what were thought to be computers by my kids until they got Macs.

The iChat is really, even more than iPod, a story of critical mass. We knew that the iPod was going to take off because we saw the greatness and we wanted one ourselves.

Then we saw the next level of greatness, which was that they were fashion accessories that we wanted to have a bunch of, because of the colors. Think jewelry. Then we saw still one more phase, which is the "watch TV on your iPod" phase that has just started getting big.

I want to relate the iChat to text messaging, a business that no one thought would ever amount to anything and is now the lifeblood of Verizon's (VZ - commentary - Cramer's Take) and AT&T's (T - commentary - Cramer's Take) businesses. This up-from-nothing business needed others to have phones that you could text with before you could text more and more.

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