Apple's slice of the overall U.S. PC market shrank to 2.9% in the first quarter, down from 3.2% two years earlier, says market tracker International Data Corp. But Apple has gained in consumer PC sales, especially with notebook computers.

Apple's share of U.S. consumer PC unit sales rose to 3.4% in the first quarter, up from 1.9% two years earlier. Its share of dollars spent on consumer PCs rose from 2.3% to 5.2%.

Things are brighter in the U.S. consumer notebook PC segment. Apple's unit market share rose from 0.3% to 6.8% in the two years. And its share of the market based on dollars spent rose from 0.2% to 8%.

The gain in notebook sales is really impressive. But business sales must of dropped enormously for there to be an overall slight drop. But... as opposed to 2 years ago, or 4 years ago, or 8 years ago, or 10 years ago, Apple now has a legitimate story to sell to businesses. Xservers are very highly rated. For one thing they got an A from a PC Mag poll where IBM's servers got a C+. And there's a reason: Apple is now the purveyor of the easiest to use Unix. Its FreeBSD core is extremely stable compared to Windows XP, and totally compatible with the whole world of open source server software such as Apache, which ships with every Mac.

For many applications, businesses really should be using an Apple server. That is something that was not true in the past -- the old Mac OS just wasn't stable enough or compatible enough with the rest of the world. But now it is. So it seems likely that Apple's business sales will be revving up some in the not-to-distant future, and that Apple's overall market share will gain.

And from the Mercury News via MacInTouch, which is a great source for all things Mac:

Buy.com will unveil a new music download service next Tuesday with a $40 million promotional campaign and launch celebration in New York's Times Square...

Like the iTunes Music Store, Buy.com will sell individual music tracks without collecting an up-front monthly subscription fee; even though it has yet to secure licensed music from all five major record labels, knowledgeable sources say.

Apple's coup was in getting all five aboard. That will give them some breathing room while they prepare iTunes for Windows.
10:43:24 AM    

I am sorry to say that we're still not ready. We still have some kind of network problem that is looking more and more likely to be hardware-based, perhaps our firewall. A lot of packets just aren't getting to our servers, although other servers at the same ISP do not seem to be having the same problem. We're going to remove the FW from the loop today and see what difference that makes.

Not all of us can work on that, so I've been busy adding a feature that would otherwise not have been in the pre-release release. That too has been taking a lot longer than expected. It's got some mathematical stuff going on in it, and it seems that whenever I get into math-related code that works with a fair amount of data, it takes an order of magnitude more effort per line of code than "normal" coding does -- mostly because of the need to optimize to conserve CPU time and/or memory to work within various practical constraints. As Donald Knuth said, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." But there are still (rare) cases when the punishment for not optimizing up front is so severe that you have to do it anyway. And then you are faced with: the root of all evil.

This app is an experiment. We don't know whether it will be a strategic direction for us or not -- it just seemed like an interesting thing to try, so we've taken a couple of months to put a very simple version together. We'll see. It does seem like it has potential, and I do sometimes allow myself get excited about it. But it's impossible to tell at this point whether it will "strike a chord" in real users.

I think it makes no sense for me to have named dates in advance. We don't have marketing department deadlines or 3rd-party agreements to stick to regarding this app; we have the freedom to keep working, hard, until it's what we want it to be. Talking publicly about dates was stupid of me because we are not going to release it until we get the packet issue resolved, and I finish this new feature, and the timing of all that is not entirely predictable.

It's coming Real Soon Now. Sorry for the false alarm!
8:59:06 AM