Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) will be one of the most closely watched company earnings reports this earnings season. After all, it is still the darling of the consumer electronics world, even if its stock has been blasted back to reality from its all-time highs of 2012. Now we have the independent research firm Argus maintaining its Buy rating on Apple ahead of earnings, but be advised that Argus is lowering some of its sales expectations for the iPhone and total revenues. The firm also lowered its price target.

The firm said:

We have dialed down our Apple sales and earnings per share forecasts based on the absence of a mid-year phone, either an ‘S’ (second) iteration of iPhone 5 or a lower-cost model aimed at emerging economies.

The firm also showed that it actually is less concerned about disappointing trends in the high-end smartphone space, in part because of difficulty in trading down actually leading to a loyalty among Apple customers. It turns out that swapping out of existing media libraries and platforms is no simple task.

Argus expects a subdued earnings report and next quarter guidance, but the firm also shows that this should set the stage for a strong calendar year-end quarter. Despite the firm lowering estimates, Argus is above-consensus for fiscal 2013 and 2014. The firm lowered the price target to $540 from $600, and the consensus price target from Thomson Reuters is $538.44 on last look.

Argus expects that revenue will be in the $35 billion range in its upcoming report, under the prior $36 billion and mostly in-line with the Thomson Reuters consensus of $35.11 billion. The firm lowered earnings estimates based on fewer iPhone units this year. Argus’s research report said:

We entered the calendar year assuming Apple would launch one of these models in mid- to late summer and one in the typical September slot leading up to the year-end holidays. We now believe iPhone 5S will have a typical September launch, where it may or may not be joined by a new lower-end handset. We are less concerned about disappointing smartphone metrics from Blackberry, Nokia, HTC, and Samsung being an indicator of iPhone demand.

As Apple users can only optimize their existing media via the high-end Apple devices, Argus believes this creates a captured customer environment. Another word of caution comes from key events like the iOS and other software upgrades, and the increased capital allocation for shareholders have both failed to drive the share price higher.

Apple shares are trading up less than 0.5% right at $432.00 on Wednesday morning, and the 52-week trading range is $385.10 to $705.07.

Today’s research report sounds very mixed. It seems that the report is intended to be mixed. The key takeaway not formally being said is that this is one more step in what value investors would start to get excited about for the long haul. Unfortunately, Apple has been unable to convince most of the street that it is about to make leaps and bounds at recapturing its glory as a stock.

As you can see in the Yahoo! Finance chart below, Apple is currently a range bound stock, but also note that it is at a critical juncture as far as the 50-day moving average is concerned, and its more important long-term 200-day moving average is about $50 above the current share price.

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