Amidst the ongoing macroeconomic malaise (is it over yet? Can we come out from under the covers?), the PC industry's sales have been suffering as big corporations and cash-strapped consumers postpone those discretionary purchases of shiny new gear. The expectation, based on 2008's results, was that this quarter would be tough sledding.

Results from analysts Gartner and IDC, however, both show an uptick in unit sales across the PC market year-over-year (2.3% higher globally per IDC, 0.5% higher per Gartner). Any pickup in sales comes as a surprise to Gartner, which had predicted a 5.6% decline in unit shipments.

For Apple specifically, the news is also good: both firms predict a boost in unit sales and share percentage for Apple's CPU shipments, with US numbers up from 8.6% to 8.8% share (Gartner) or a blazing 9.4% share (IDC). For the unvarnished results, you can tune in this coming Monday, 10/19 at 2pm PT to hear Apple's quarterly earnings call.

[via BrainstormTech]

When the video recording capabilities of the iPhone 3GS were announced, I really looked forward to using the direct YouTube uploads to share things that no one else cared about, like my dog or my nephew. It seems like many other 3GS owners had similar ideas.

The YouTube blog is reporting that since the 3GS was released last friday, uploads have increased from mobile devices by 400% per day. They even list some of the many videos that have been uploaded since the 3GS release that range from boring to annoying.

I know that these mobile uploads of videos have a pretty limited audience, and most people watching them will wonder why they were ever uploaded in the first place. However, it does make sharing special (or mundane) moments with family and friends much easier, and I for one am happy to have the option.

[via MacRumors]

Piqqem, a service that crowdsources stock picks, has some interesting demographic data about who says they're buying AAPL. Among female users, Apple is the most highly rated stock to buy.

The lowest-rated stock is Dillards -- which leads to an interesting analysis by Alex Salkever, director of research and marketing at Piqqem. He says that focused specialty retailers are better at weathering the economic downturn so far than large department stores.

"And while Apple has seen sales growth in its chain stores level off, I submit that a big reason why Apple has held strong is due to the attraction its products, stores, and services hold to women beyond the teenage years," he writes.

Personally, I think linking womens' stock choice specifically to the retail experience falls somewhere between a little chauvinist and a little short-sighted. AAPL is also the most popular stock among all of Piqqem's users, for example. It certainly can't hurt Apple's business, though, to appeal to women, teens, and other key demographics with disposable income right now.

Many analysts point to Apple's strong cash position as reason enough to buy AAPL. Indeed, Apple's stock price has recovered some since Macworld, and is trading around $98 a share. It's certainly shy of their 52-week high of $192 a share, but it's well off their 52-week low of $78.20.

Just a reminder: Be sure to come back today at 5 p.m. Eastern (that's 2 p.m. Pacific) for Apple's First Quarter 2009 Results Conference Call. We'll be liveblogging the occasion, with contributions from your favorite TUAW bloggers, and yours truly.

Apple is streaming audio from the call here. A recording of the call will be available at that page for a few weeks afterward.

Fortune's Apple 2.0 blog has its roundup of projected Q1 sales numbers from Bernstein Research's Toni Sacconaghi and Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster:

• Mac sales. Munster: 2.5 million to 2.6 million. Sacconaghi: 2.57 million.
• iPod sales. Munster: 18.6 million. Sacconaghi: 18.1 million.
• iPhone sales: Munster: 6.4 million. Sacconaghi: 3.5 million to 4 million.

In related news, AAPL hit a two-year low yesterday, closing at its nadir of $78.20 per share. Also, Bloomberg is reporting that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will review Apple's 10-K filing from last year. Apple hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing, but Bloomberg says the SEC wants to make sure investors weren't being misled about Steve Jobs' health. (Via Macworld.)

More coverage of the earnings report is available at our sister site Blogging Stocks.

Citi analyst Richard Gardner repeated the firm's "buy" recommendation for Apple stock, but reduced his estimate through 2011 to "reflect a more conservative view of consumer spending," according to the Associated Press.

Gardner reduced his 12-month price target to $132 from $153. He noted "soft" iPhone shipments in the last quarter of 2008 and conservative guidance for the first quarter of 2009 as reasons behind the cut.

"We view weakness as a buying opportunity," Gardner said. If Apple's stock were to drop by $7 or $8 before the company's Q1 2009 conference call on January 21, "[Citi] would be aggressive buyers." He expects the company will announce a profit of $1.42 per share for Q4 2008 during the call.

AAPL was down by about $1.45 in afternoon trading.

[Via Mac Observer.]

Microsoft's share of the operating system market is dropping, while Apple computers and handhelds have topped 10 percent for the first time, according to a new report on Internet-connected computers.

NetApplications, the company that tracks browser and operating system market share for a variety of sites across the Internet, released its data for December 2008. According to a Computerworld analysis, the number of Windows users decreased in December by 0.94 percent to 88.7 percent.

The fall was the steepest in four years since Net Applications began collecting data, and was also more than twice that of any similar period in the previous three years. The Computerworld article does note that December statistics do slant slightly towards the Mac due to the reduced number of in-office days for corporate users, but the overall shift is decidedly Mac-ward even once that's accounted for.

Apple's share is just over 10 percent, if one combines the market share for both Macs and iPhones. Macs account for 9.63 percent of computers online. (Windows Mobile devices are included in the 88.7 percent figure.)

Also of note, almost three quarters of Macs online have an Intel processor. This time last year, less than half had one. Overall, Mac OS X's share grew by 31.7 percent compared to a year ago.

Windows XP remains the operating system with the largest installed base, with over 65 percent of the market.

Apple saw the iPhone's market share triple over the past year, capturing 12.9 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, according to a new Gartner analysis.

For the quarter ending September 30, iPhones accounted for 3.4 percent of the market in 2007. That figure was more than 3x higher on the same day in 2008.

Nokia is the leader worldwide in smartphone sales, with 42.4 percent of the market. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion comes in second with 15.9 percent. In North America, Apple is in second place behind RIM, with iPhones accounting for over a quarter of all smartphones.

Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza also noted that this quarter marked the first time iPhone sales exceeded those of Windows Mobile devices; that's pretty astonishing when you consider how many flavors of WM handsets are out there.

[Via Macworld.]

Apple 2.0's Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes some new Net Applications statistics that suggest 8.87 percent of all Internet users use a Mac: a new record.

Add to that the iPhone platform's 0.37 percent, and over one in eleven use an Apple product to browse the web. The iPhone gained 12 percent more users compared to the month before.

Also notable is that Windows users accounted for less than 90 percent of Internet users for the first time in recent memory. Also, market share for Internet Explorer dropped below 70 percent for the first time since its popularity surged in the late 90s.

Linux also gained ground, increasing almost 17 percent to 0.83 percent of all Internet users.

Net Applications tracks statistics from over 160 million visits to websites it monitors. The full report is here.

BusinessWeek's Gene Marcial is gushing -- gushing -- over Apple stock, suggesting they're not only a good buying opportunity for those who already own some shares, but a good entry point for those who have never owned stock in the company.

"The case for Apple is simple: Its stock is cheap based mainly on strong earnings and sales growth, and the outlook for further expansion of sales and profits. And the stock's profile based on such benchmarks as its technical chart pattern and price-earnings ratio affirms Apple's attraction," he writes.

Marical quotes Standard & Poor's Thomas Smith, Barclays Capital's Ben Reitzes, and Needham's Charles Wolf -- all who have their own reasons to recommend buying the stock. Of 34 analysts who track the stock, 27 recommend buying and five recommend holding. Only two suggest you sell.

As of this writing, Apple was up by over $7 per share at 89.75 during a generally positive session this morning. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up above 8,311, an increase of 265 points.

Shares of Apple stock closed higher today, among a widespread buying spree that pushed the Dow Industrials up a record-breaking 936 points.

AAPL closed at $110.26 per share, an increase of $13.46. Nearly 55 million shares changed hands.

Microsoft, Dell, Google, HP, Sun, and AT&T also posted double-digit percentage gains for the day.

Analyst firm Sanford C. Bernstein upgraded Apple stock to "outperform" this morning, saying the company's short-term prognosis looks good, despite the dip in the market. Bernstein did, however, cut its price target by $50 to $135.

AAPL was up slightly in after-hours trading.

Gene Munster is skeptical that Apple's guidance of lower margins for the rest of the year in its Q3 conference call back in July, and expects the company to continue to outperform expectations.

The Piper Jaffray analyst said that lower prices for NAND flash memory will offset any reductions in price for new iPods introduced last month.

Munster speculates that even with an introduction of a sub-$1,000 MacBook before the end of the year, Apple's margins will remain healthy. Yes, it will have an impact, but not to the degree that Apple execs hinted in their phone call: Munster thinks margins would only fall to around 30 percent.

In fact, Munster says "investors would see the lack of redesigned, lower-priced Macs as a more significant negative than they would a 30 percent GM guide in the December quarter." (Emphasis mine.)

He reiterated his "buy" rating. Munster's price target for AAPL is still higher than many others (at least recently), at $250 per share.

[Via Ars and AppleInsider.]

Nine bigwigs at Taiwan's Inventec Appliances could be headed to jail over allegations of insider trading-- the executives allegedly failed to report lowered order numbers by Apple before dropping off $22.4 million worth of stock on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Apparently, Apple decided to send more of its iPod order to China, and the executives reportedly knew in mid-January that the decision had been made to do so. But they didn't reveal the troubles until mid-March, at which point IA's stock tumbled, and the execs had already reportedly unloaded their stock.

In other executives and stock news, Jobsy picked up a few Apple shares this week-- 120,000 for $5.75 a piece. The stock price has actually been dropping since around August 1st, but considering the price is right around $117 right now, Steve is sitting pretty-- it's good to be the king. Apple says Jobs isn't selling at this time, though. Obviously-- he's got to wait until the ultraportable shows up, right?

[via MacBytes]

Attention enthusiastic iPhone owners - Apple would like to hear just what it is you like so much about your new gadget. At a new page under apple.com/iphone, Apple has presented a form with which you can share your iPhone stories. Has the iPhone changed the way you work? Perhaps you warmed grandma's heart with your finger-flickin' photo albums? Or maybe your two-and-a-half year-old figured out how to use your iPhone? Whatever the tale, Apple would like to hear it, probably so they can scatter some quotes from real world folks like you around the iPhone product pages.

Personally, I had to thank Apple for finally putting the real internet in my pocket, as no other device - not even a BlackBerry or IE on Windows Mobile - has been able to handle the home-grown content management system we use for Weblogs, Inc. blogs. The iPhone can, which means I'm able to perform some of my administrative duties at Download Squad anytime, anywhere I need, and that's enough of a life-changing story for me.

[via iPhone Alley]

Not many people are familiar with how flexible and shareable your NetNewsWire / NewsGator subscriptions are, so I thought it was time to elaborate a little and play with Automator again.

First on our sharing list: the ability to embed an automatically updating list of your NetNewsWire / NewsGator subscriptions into your website or blog. To enable this, simply sign into your NewsGator account (if you're using NetNewsWire 2.1.x or 3.x I believe you automatically get at least a 1-year NewsGator subscription) and go to Settings > Edit Locations. Assuming you have syncing with NewsGator enabled, you should see at least one location related to your NetNewsWire feeds which should have a 'Blogroll' option listed. Clicking on that will give you all the options you need to embed a small snippet of code in your site to create a list of the subscriptions you want to share publicly.

There is another way to share your NetNewsWire subscriptions in a handy-dandy file format, easy for friends, family and visitors to download and import into just about any newsreader they use, including NetNewsWire, Google Reader and even Vienna (this is technically referred to as an OPML file, with the extension .OPML). NetNewsWire offers a File > Export Subscriptions command, but there are a few options involved and this isn't very automation-friendly. If you want to make your subscriptions available to, for example, website visitors or simply back them up on a regular basis, I put together two very basic, two-step Automator apps (packaged as zip files) that can work fine on their own or easily be incorporated into larger workflows.

Streaming iTunes music over a network is good, but being able to actually pull down and borrow that music is great, and ourTunes is just the app for the job. Running on Mac and PC (I think it's java), ourTunes allows you to browse the library of anyone on your network who has sharing switched on in iTunes, then pull down songs that get your feet tappin'.

I don't know if this works with the new iTunes 7, but I remember seeing this app a while ago, back when I used to work in an office on campus, and I'm genuinely surprised it hasn't received a calling card from Apple's C&D ninjas. Grab it while you can ladies and gents.