Apple's Macintosh attains 8% market share in December 2007

The end of 2007 was especially good for Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) this year, as the company's Mac line of personal desktop and laptop computers broke the 8% market share for the first time ever during the final two days of 2007, according to Net Applications, a web measurement firm.

That's right -- Apple now has 8% of the PC marketplace. For a company that has been considered a 'niche' brand in the sector since, well, since forever, this is a huge achievement. Keep in mind, though, that this data do not represent sales numbers from global retailers as what is generally used for market share references.

Net Applications saw 7.3% of the 40,000 websites it monitors browsed by Apple machines in December. Again, this data isn't indicative of machines that browsed all, but a small collection of 40,000.

Still, this sample represents a good set of what Apple was able to accomplish last month. On December 30 and 31, the sites monitored by Net Applications saw Apple machines representing 8.01% of all machines. Not to fear, Windows lovers -- Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) venerable operating system represented 91.8% market share in December (although it was down from November's 92.4%).