Price cuts for Apple Computer Inc’s lower end products are pretty much over for this year, chairman John Sculley told Reuters in an interview: the company cut the Mac SE by 17% and on its laser printer 14% in February, and says that it has avoided shaving gross margins so far because the market has been moving away from the bottom end Apple II and onto the Macintosh, enabling it to be competitive while preserving margins; he thought that the impact on Apple’s share price of Microsoft Corp’s Windows 3.0 was an over-reaction, and reiterated that Apple would have new Macintosh products for the lower end of the market later this year – but a new laptop is not among them, although the company is working hard on laptop products; Sculley said that international sales continued to grow fast and that Japanese sales were an outrageous success, growing at a 100% annual rate on its way to becoming Apple’s second biggest market after the US in the mid-1990s; he also said that the company saw no slow-down in Europe.
