Let's get this straight first: The many desktops, laptops, phones, and portable media players from Apple may not grab a large share of their respective markets, but each one competes just as effectively as the segment's top-tiered gizmos. But some third-party onlookers would agree that Apple may have lost the market's direction after it introduced the MacBook Air. Why? Read on to find out.

Research group Gartner has released the preliminary results of their Q3 2007 marketing report, which indicates Apple Inc.'s share of the U.S. computer market to be at 8.1%. As a point of comparison, Apple's market shares from the same time frame last year were at 6.2% - this indicates that the company enjoyed a 37.2% boost in growth compared to last year's figures.

Delving into these figures further, we find that Apple's U.S.-based Mac shipments for Q3 2007 totalled at around 1,338,000. The figures for last year are recorded to be 975,000 shipments. The Gartner report marks Apple as holding the third largest share among the U.S. PC market's top five vendors, although the company has experienced the biggest year-to-year growth among its competitors.

Hewlett-Packard experienced similar growth, with its market share increasing by 16.5% as compared to its figures from last year. Toshiba, just below Apple in Gartner's top five, reports 16.3% growth, while current market leader Dell experienced a 5.5% drop.

It'll be interesting to see how far Apple will go in the near future, or how the recently announced  Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 will affect their future sales.

As more and more businesses across the globe switch to paperless environments and move their data from hard copies to the web, fears that printing may soon become trivial have risen. Hewlett-Packard, however, says it can adapt to the changing times.

The printer giant has introduced an umbrella strategy called "Print 2.0" and it's touted to change the way people think about printing. At the center of the plan are two jewels: a web-based application called Cloudpoint and the Apple iPhone.

In a nutshell, the idea behind Print 2.0 is built on the fact that most of today's printed content come from the web. With the introduction of the iPhone, mobile users were given a true OS with a fully functional browser. However, the small screen of the iPhone  raises the need to print things on its browser, so a software solution must be adopted to bridge the gap from cell phone to printer.

That's where Cloudpoint comes in. By visiting the HP-powered Cloudpoint service site at cloudprint.hpl.hp.com, users will be able to register, enter their number for verification and then select any PC connected to a printer and internet anywhere in the world to print text coming in encoded in PDA form.

"The world is going to flip. We want to ride the wave of the Web," says HP Labs Internet and Computing Platforms director Patrick Seaglia.

Apple's getting a large bite out of the second quarter of this year's fiscal year (April to June,) having sold 960,000 units of Macs in the US. This makes them the fourth largest vendor of computers in the US.

The big three that stands in Apple's way are Gateway, who only sold around 5,000 more units than Apple, HP and Dell. HP and Dell are by far the unbeatable two both having sold more than 4,000 units, with Dell close to 5,000.

Although this is good news for Apple, it did not appear in the top 5 worldwide computer vendors, but it does bode well for the Macintosh systems as they are making headway into a large market share with the US, getting 5.6%. This may not seem like a huge number but bear in mind that HP and Dell each have more than 20% of the market in the palm of their hands and the rest that didn't make it to the top 5 vendors will all split what's left: 31.5% of the market.

What the numbers boils down to is that Apple sold 960,000 units out of the 17,000,000 computers sold in the US. That's a huge number. Also, it's a large step from last quarter where they only had 4.8% of the market. Bottomline, Apple's progressing steadily, especially as it has also grabbed fourth place in leading vendors in computer notebooks last March.

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According to numbers released by the NPD Group, the worldwide market of laptop notebooks saw a 14% rise in Apple shipments since last month. And better yet for the Cupertino-based company, 14% of all notebook computers sold last month were also Apple-branded.

Analysts believe that this may be an indication that the laptop community is embracing more and more of Apple, despite being only fourth place in the current generation laptop race in the U.S. Hewlett-Packard, Gateway, and Toshiba sit at spots above Steve Jobs' company, as reported.

Further consideration of Apple's year-on-year growth, however, may drive the company to steal the third spot. The May figures actually represent a 65% jump from Apple's figure last year, and if Apple can keep that year-on-year rate up for the next month, the numbers would spring the modest 14% to a proud 20% in just thirty days.

Apple grabbed 9.9% of the laptop market last March besting Compaq which only posted an 8.5% showing. This feat has put the company at fourth place in NPDs list of highest selling vendors of retail notebooks.

The companies that were ahead of Apple are Gateway(13%), Hewlett-Packard (23.9%) and Toshiba (26.2%). Apple's sales posting is up from its February sales but lower than their figures from January which was at 10.1%. The company has been posting good numbers as of late because their desktop sales have also put them on the top five list of NPD. They took a respectable 7.7% of the market in that respect.

This should not be any surprise, since Apple really has established itself in the notebook field. Will their upcoming new releases be enough for them to claim the top spot on the ranking? We will have to wait and see.

World leader in computer manufacture Dell Computer's rough first quarter was all it took to allow competitors Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Acer to climb back into the fray and rack up some serious growth figures.

Apple Computers was the biggest gainer as it saw a whopping 30 percent increase in its worldwide shipments. Its total U.S. market share rose from four percent to five percent, sealing a fantastic initial quarter performance. Hewlett-Packard also saw sharp increases with a 28.2 rise in shipments and an ownage of 19.1 percent of the total market.

Asian computer powers Lenovo and Acer are also growing. The Chinese firm that acquired the respected IBM hardware wing has showing it can ship PCs by the truckloads to become the third largest computer vendor on the planet.  Acer posted similar figures.

Dell, on the other hand, seems unable to cope with the times. The former king had its shipments drop by a significant 14 percent while its total market share is now only second to HP. U.S. sales are down even though the market grew by a tenth this year.

The woes of the company may have started when bad press spread like wildfire regarding its notebooks with severe, and sometimes explosive problems. The company has yet to regain momentum after the hard blow to its reputation.

The launch of the loudly-trumpeted Windows Vista and the relative market success that followed it did little, if any, damage to the sales performance of Apple computers, says a report by Apple Insider.

Apple sales are down by a mere tenth of a point, which is quite a feat considering that many analysts assumed a market storm by the new Microsoft operating system. The storm has passed and Apple still stands. The Mac's 30 percent annual growth was unaffected this year as it remained at a solid 30 percent.

Apple's computer hardware department is in the US top five of dealers, only slightly behind market leaders Dell and Hewlett-Packard. It faces some tough competition, though, as Southeast-Asian manufacturers Lenovo, Acer and Toshiba also posted strong shipment figures.

"Microsoft's official consumer launch of Vista in January, [sic] had very limited impact on overall worldwide shipment demand on a quarterly basis," says research firm Gartner.

Apple is set to release its own next-generation operating system called Mac OS X Leopard edition, which it claims is easily superior to the Windows Vista. The Leopard is slated to arrive late this year.

LED backlit notebooks are the new fad for notebook manufacturers, the forerunners being Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, and Asustek. Now Apple and Hewlett Packard (HP) are going to release their models with the said technology in Q2 2007.

Even when big notebook makers are using LEDs, Taiwan LED manufacturers are unlikely to profit from the innovation, according to DigiTimes.com

The use of LED backlights has become more popular, but LED manufacturers in Taiwan would unlikely supply the demand since their LEDs simply don't cut it. The specifications of a backlit notebook is 1,680 nits, and Taiwan LED makers have yet to reach that brightness level. Patent restraints would also be a hurdle since notebook makers consider that better than cost competitiveness.

However, they will continue making the LEDs for handsets though they are constantly under pressure to be cost competitive.

John Martellaro has an article up on Mac News World that tries to shed light on issues that drive Apple's relationships with the business world, Apple's plans to expand, and the issues that could trouble them.

Here are the five issues he identified and a little bit on how it affects Apple's business sales:

Degrees of Freedom - Apple does its best to comply with government regulations, but handle them behind the scenes so that managers and engineers in the company can just focus on work. They have very minimalist and simple policies, but they enforce them strictly.

Because of this, employees feel a degree of freedom and empowerment working for Apple. As to how they interact to other businesses Martellaro says that Apple says this: Here's the product we're selling today, take it or leave it, you'll love it. That doesn't feel so 'free' right?

Partnerships - Face it: Apple is a company that's fun to love. Apple deals with companies that often want to become related (or even a part) of this successful company. That desire to insinuate themselves into Apple's success blurs the rational distinction between fandom and client requirements. Apple is alert to this and often paradoxically distances itself when the customer is just seeking a closer relationship. Don't you want to be "closer" to your clients?

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