A new NPD report says that 12% of US households now own a Mac of some kind. That's a nice gain -- just a year ago, back in 2008, the same stat was at 9 percent, so Apple has made nice jumps just in the last 12 months. But before you start crowing about Apple's impending superiority, here's another fact that might have you thinking twice: of those households, a whopping 85% also own a Windows computer. In fact, 66% of those Apple households actually own three computers or more. So many more Apple owners own more than one computer, and of those, it's pretty darn likely that one of them is still a Windows PC. That's certainly the case at my house (I own a Mac mini, a MacBook, and a PC), and I bet it's true for lots of you Mac users as well.

There is good news for Apple in terms of iPods however: 63% of Apple-owning households also have an iPod on hand, though I'd question whether that's chicken or egg: do they own an iPod because they owned a Mac or vice versa? Additionally, Apple users are more likely to have navigation systems in their cars, they're more likely to earn over $100,000, and they're likely to have twice as many gadgets as other users -- 48 gadgets on average for Mac owners, compared to 24 for the average consumer household.

While those stats are interesting, none of them seem super surprising -- Apple has a reputation for high-end gadgets, and so anyone who seeks out their products is going to pick up some other gadgets as well.

Where do you find yourself with respect to the rumors of a new iPod touch somewhere in the pipeline? Having a slew of case manufacturers showing products with cutouts for a camera strikes me as enticing but ultimately unconvincing; hearing from Pinch Media, however, raises the credibility level to 'high.' The App Store analytics provider has confirmed that instances of an "iPod 3,1" model have begun showing up in the usage logs from apps that have implemented Pinch's tracking tools.

What could this possibly mean? Well, going back to March of this year, the BGR team sussed out a few future model IDs from a beta of the iPhone 3.0 firmware, including the iPod 3,1 listing; Pinch says that the device type first started showing up in April, and sightings picked up in May. Pinch's stats should be taken quite seriously, as the company first announced appearances of the model indicator that eventually revealed itself as the iPhone 3GS way back in January.

If that timeline were to hold true again, we wouldn't expect to see the iPod touch next-gen on store shelves before the holiday shopping season... but it's likely that the engineering effort for the new touch will bootstrap off of the iPhone 3GS platform, and the QA/testing cycle for the device will probably be quite a bit shorter than it would be for a new phone. If I had to guess... perhaps a Steve-enabled press event during the last week of July? Should be lively.

[As noted in the comments, Apple's track record for iPod introductions does have a consistent tick-tock rhythm to it: betting on a September launch for the new touch would be a prudent call.]

Thanks Joachim!

Wow. It isn't even close. Apple blew by HP, Dell and even MagicJack (!) with the most visits to a website in May. According to the people who compile such statistics at Nielsen, Apple drew 55.7 million unique viewers, more than double what next ranked HP did. Much of that may have been driven by anticipation of the new iPhone. Here's the chart.

As with most keynote presentations, Apple released a lot of numbers about just how many people are adopting the Mac and iPhone platforms.

First, over the last three years, the active Mac OS X installed base has grown from 25 million users to 75 million users. This is great news for the platform and for the entire Mac ecosystem.

Also, over 5,200 developers from 54 countries around the world are attending WWDC. Over a million people have downloaded the free iPhone SDK, and created 50,000 applications for Apple iPhones and iPod touch devices.

Speaking of which, over 40 million iPhones and iPod touches have been sold to date. In April, Apple announced that those users had downloaded a cumulative total of one billion applications.

While the economy continues to tank, and desktop PC purchases are falling, a new survey from ChangeWave Research says Apple customers are the happiest buyers. Looking at people who bought a computer in the last 90 days, 81% said they were very satisfied with their purchase. That compares with 67% high satisfaction from Asus, Dell is at 55%, HP at 52%, and Toshiba at 52%. Only 50% of Lenovo buyers were very satisfied. Ouch.

Apple buyers plans to get a new laptop have increased 3% since the January survey. Plans to buy a desktop have declined by 2%.

Other survey highlights reflect similar opinions to Apple buyers. People buying brands other than Apple still want laptops, while interest in desktops continues to sink. There is also continuing interest in netbooks, and many Apple owners in the survey said they considered the iPhone to be a form of netbook.

The report also notes that overall consumer electronics spending is at the lowest level since ChangeWave began their research in 2002.

If you'd like to see a PDF of the complete survey results click here.

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.

Joel Comm, publisher of the highly-useful app iFart Mobile, has published some data about how sales related to popularity in the App Store.

While I have only a high-school understanding of statistics, it would appear from Comm's data that as sales rise in a linear fashion, App Store ranking increases (or I should say decreases, because lower numbers are better) logarithmically.

Comm admits that his data isn't carefully tabulated: he hand-counted the sales, as they're broken down by country, and says he didn't include countries "where one or two units were sold." Comm's data was collected between December 12th and 17th.

On Sunday's talkcast, the Iconfactory's Craig Hockenberry and Gedeon Maheux lamented the lack of analysis tools for sales, and said they'd appreciate more transparency about how rankings are mathematically determined.

Comm anticipates more data will be forthcoming from other developers. With more data, a more detailed statistical analysis can be performed, and preferably from someone other than a TUAW blogger who majored in art.

J.D. Power and Associates released the results of a survey yesterday, showing Apple's iPhone ranked highest in terms of customer satisfaction among 1,388 business wireless customers queried between August and September.

Apple scored 778 (out of 1,000), higher than Blackberry-maker RIM (703) and Samsung (701). The scores were derived from survey answers in five categories: ease of operation, operating system, physical design, handset features, and battery aspects.

Apple owners reported the highest average purchase price for a smartphone, $337. Motorola owners paid the least, averaging $169. The average across all smartphone brands was $216.

The survey also found that a quarter of all smartphone users have at least one software-related problem with their current handset. Forty-four percent had to reboot their device at least once a week. Sixty-nine percent own a hands-free device, and 74 percent of them are wireless.

[Via Macworld.]

Widely-read Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is revising his prior estimate for the quarter ending a week from Tuesday, and his outlook is even rosier than before.

Instead of 4.1 million iPhone 3Gs, Munster expects Apple will sell 5 million of the handsets. Likewise, he's revising his estimates for Mac sales up by 300,000 units, and iPod sales up by 200,000 units.

If he's right, it will mean Apple will have sold 7.4 million iPhones so far this year. That puts Apple well on track to meet its own prediction of selling 10 million handsets for calendar year 2008.

On the other hand, we have Morgan Stanley, who cut price targets for nine hardware companies, including Apple. Morgan cited a "fragile consumer," slower overall spending, and a stronger dollar (the last of which impacts sales abroad for U.S. companies).

This comes after a weak August for Mac sales, which -- in context -- only means that Apple's numbers didn't grow quite as fast as they did in prior months. They still sold 23 percent more Mac units than August 2007, but that was sharply lower than July 2008's 43 percent increase over July 2007.

[Via Fortune, Silicon Alley Insider, and 24/7 Wall St.]

Thanks, Robert!

A survey by ChangeWave says Apple is looking ahead to record sales for Macs, which smiles in the face of further declines in U.S. consumer spending. The survey polled 4,416 people between August 4 and August 12.

If the poll is any indication, Apple will do well in the next three months, with 34 percent of respondents planning on buying a new Mac laptop, and 30 percent planning on buying a new Mac desktop. It's unclear how many of those overlap (that is, people who want to buy both). That's a modest uptick since last month -- two percent more for laptops and three percent more for desktops.

Compare that to general consumer electronics spending: 15 percent said they'd spend more over the next three months, while 34 percent said they'd spend less. That's almost unchanged since last month, but 13 points lower since August last year.

Also in the survey, 17 percent of the respondents (who own an iPhone 3G) are now more likely to buy a Mac in the future; one percent said they were less likely.

[Via MacsimumNews.]

Ben Gray, analyst at Forrester Research, says that Mac OS X accounts for 4.5 percent of the business operating system market, 3¾ times their share in January 2007.

Computerworld notes that all this has happened with one thing notably absent: an enterprise strategy. "I haven't seen anything from Apple that seems to show it's attack[ing] the enterprise market," Gray said.

He says the gains in market share are due to two trends: client virtualization (using software like Parallels or VMWare) and the idea that corporate IT departments are more willing to support a broader range of hardware and software.

"In the end, [IT departments] want their employees to be as productive as humanly possible, so they'll approve tools that people are more comfortable with," said Gray.

In related news, Windows' overall share of the corporate market dipped slightly from 95.6 to 94.9 percent for the same time period.

[Via Macworld.]

According to HitsLink, the people who track web usage statistics, iPhone users account for about a third of one percent of web browsers on the Internet, the largest of any mobile platform.

iPhone ranks fourth overall in terms of operating system market share, behind Windows, Mac, and Linux. On August 16, the stats peaked at 0.45 percent. That's a two-fold increase since the iPhone 3G was released July 11.

Jim Goldman, of business television network CNBC, says that "it's a key metric that shows market penetration and customer use." He cited a report by analyst Andy Hargreaves that suggests the increase in browser market share highlights the iPhone's key, long-term advantages. Well, duh.

"Consumers seem to know what some investors are having trouble grasping -- or believing: that Apple might be positioned better in so many key markets than any of its competitors," Captain Obvious Goldman said.

[Via MacDailyNews.]

A month ago, Apple was crowing about selling one million iPhone 3G handsets over its opening weekend. In a month, they've tripled that figure.

According to Fortune and analyst Michael Cote of the (eponymous and nascent, from what I can Google) Cote Collaborative, Apple has already hit the three million mark, with many investors expecting only three to four million handsets sold by the end of the quarter.

Cote is a former T-Mobile executive, who Scott Moritz says has been accurate with his predictions in the past.

It took over 10 weeks for the original iPhone to sell just one million handsets. The iPhone 3G accounts for almost a third of all iPhones sold, ever.

Cote says that meeting demand will be Apple's challenge going forward, as it enters 20 new countries on August 22 -- almost doubling its market presence worldwide. "The demand is so strong it may impact or delay the new countries coming on," he said.

According to a survey from the Gartner group, Apple is again the third largest PC vendor in the United States. The company nosed out Acer for the second-quarter bronze. (Dell is number one, followed by HP in second place.)

Apple shipped 1.4 million units last quarter, 38 percent more than the prior quarter. In the United States, PC shipments overall grew by just 4.2 percent.

IDC research manager David Daoud credited Apple's competitors with the company's success, citing consumers' disappointment with the "lack of innovation" among other PC manufacturers. Also: Windows Vista. 'Nuff said.

But that's just the U.S. Apple still lags worldwide, selling only 3.2 percent more units abroad than last quarter. Compare that to other manufacturers, who sold an average of 16 percent more units.

Macs account for nearly 8 percent of internet-connected computers worldwide.

[Via Infoworld.]

Fortune has the latest market share figures for December (according to a survey by Net Applications), and it's good news all around for Apple-- Mac systems jumped from a 6.8 share to 7.3, a 7.35% increase. Which is actually nothing compared to the iPhone, which jumped 33%, or even the Playstation, which jumped 50%.

Wait a minute, the Playstation? Where are they getting these numbers from? Apparently Net Applications gets these figures by monitoring browser information from sites tracking their hits through their products (of which Hitslink is one). So a jump for "Mac" systems doesn't mean a jump in sales figures, or even ownership-- all it means is that more people whose browsers reported them as Macs visited Hitslink sites in December than in November. And more people whose browsers reported them as the iPhone did the same. Not quite the definitive numbers they first claim to be, but Net Apps says (of course they would) that these numbers do correspond to trends found by more objective studies.

And as long as they're firing up the flames on both the OS wars and the gaming platform wars, Net Apps goes ahead and swings for the triple play-- they also report that, according to their numbers, the map of people reporting as Mac owners corresponds extremely well to the blue sections of the red/blue maps of the last US elections. Um, yeah-- we're not touching that one. You guys can fight it out in the comments.