Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) may be looking at lowering pricing on some of its most popular Mac PCs after the first year-over-year decline in Mac shipments (3% drop) in the last six years. It's no surprise: the U.S. and much of the world are in a recession and cash conservation is king. Macs are among the most expensive PCs there are in many ways (regardless of style, design and software), and customers are backing off a bit.

Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), while still having outpaced all PC makers in growth during the dismal last quarter of 2008, realized that it's not above every other competitor on the PC planet. Consumers seem to have been gaga over Apple's laptops in the last few quarters, but even that fervor is being tempered by trying economic times.

The Q4 period of 2008 saw Apple sell 1.25 million PCs, a 23% drop from the prior quarter (but an 8% increase year-over-year). At the same time, the design-conscious consumer electronics company saw its share of the U.S. PC market slip to 8% in the Q4 period from Q3's 9.5%. This was to be expected due to Apple's bump in each year's Q3 back-to-school buying period.

Taiwan's Acer, however, bumped Apple from third place to fourth in the U.S. PC market, taking 15.2% of all sales, indicating a 55% lift over the year-ago period. The Gateway and the Acer brands both are contributing to those sales, along with bargain-basement pricing that's apparently more important to Acer.

That is, market share over revenue share and Acer's huge hand in the red-hot netbook category. Apple will hold on better than the competition in 2009, but folks dropping hundreds of dollars for iPods, iPhones and thousands for MacBooks may slow down faster than the industry believes.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) has been on a run lately -- it's selling Mac computers an an ever-increasing pace, the iPhone is successfully being transitioned as the successor to the iPod universe (even with those two-year contracts!. The company can't seem to do any wrong. It literally is selling all it can, even in a recession. How can Apple do this? Its prices are not cheap and the company shies away from discounts. Well, Apple also has a marketing gold touch that's unmatched anywhere in any industry, and that's the competitive advantage.

But the gold path can last forever, right? Will the tightness of consumers' wallets and purses ever put a damper on Apple's business? That's the thinking for 2009 -- the economy will catch up to Apple's sales and the company will experience at least a little bit of the slowdown that is catching retailers like a noose around the neck. Mac sales even declined in November by 1% over the same period in 2007 at the same time overall PC sales increased 2%. The problem was desktop Mac sales, which bombed 35%. Apple's laptop sales were still on fire, though.

Will Apple see a more pronounced slowdown after the holiday sales season is over? That's anyone's guess, but it seems logical. Until the economic rut is lifted, it's hard to imagine that financially fickle consumers will be shelling out $1,000+ for a new Apple laptop PC at the drop of a hat during the first half of 2009. Plenty will, but also plenty won't. Those that won't will opt for cheaper PCs, which sell for half the cost of an Apple laptop in may cases -- and price sensitivity will be the order of the day for 2009 consumerism. Apple best be prepared for reality.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) stepped up its market share in Q3, lifting its personal computer sales to nearly 10% of all PCs sold, according to research firm Gartner, Inc. For Apple, this is great news -- it's steadily taking sales from larger competitors Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) and global PC sales leader Hewlett-Packard Corp. (NYSE: HPQ). Its laptop PCs continue to sell like hotcakes, even with prices that are much higher than the discount prices you would normally see on Windows-based laptop PCs.

Although Apple CEO Steve Jobs said last week that the company won't be getting into the "netbook" business (tiny notebook PCs with limited features), a Gartner research analyst said the company could be in trouble for not having a product to address this market. I think Apple is right here, though; just because there is a market doesn't mean Apple needs to play in it. The laptop PC industry continues to try and find the next big niche so that product segments like fully-functional laptop PCs won't see decelerating growth. When there is a lack of demand, create it; that must be the PC industry's rallying call.

With Apple releasing quarterly earnings in just over an hour from now, my prediction is that the current quarter's results will reflect a company that is timing its product releases, refreshes and entire product line transitions with great precision. It has shown that it can grow market share without being involved in trends that others create. Rather, it creates its own trends and gives birth to new industries as a result.

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has had tremendous success in the digital music player and now cellphone markets. Starting with the iPod and (not) ending with the iPhone, the company has been a force -- if not the force -- in consumer electronics this year. But, was it all to get more customers buying Apple's computer products? That argument -- known as a the halo effect -- has been drawn up in countless articles and blog posts. Surprise, surprise -- it is most likely working.

The market share Apple's Macintosh computer products have been seeing has taken the Cupertino, Calif., company from a single-digit slice of the PC market to a force to be reckoned with in 2007. In a November report from research firm ChangeWave Research, the data indicates that more potential buyers than ever plan to buy a Mac in the near future. Is Steve Jobs dancing in his office? Probably not -- this has been part of his plan for more than just a few years. After all, capture them with marketing and surround them with your other products behind the competitor's back, huh Steve?

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) does not want Apple Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AAPL) Mac owners to run the Windows Vista operating system on those machines, reversing a decision made just this week. In the "virtualization" world, Microsoft's current Windows XP computer operating system can be run inside of a "virtual software" environment on current Apple MacIntosh computers so that Apple fans can use those stylish Apple systems with Apple software but can still access the Windows environment for certain things (like work email or running Windows-only applications).

That arrangement works pretty well for the Windows XP operating system on current (or even older) Mac computers, but Microsoft has now said that it will only allow the bare-bones Windows Vista "Basic" operating system to be used in this virtual Apple Mac environment. Vista versions such as the "Premium" or "Ultimate" won't be allowed to be used with "virtualization" software at all on Apple systems.

However, with Apple systems now using Intel CPUs, installing Windows Vista alongside the Apple Mac operating system without this kind of "emulation" is no problem. Basically, Microsoft does not want customers using the nicer versions of Windows Vista on older Apple Mac machines made before Steve Jobs decided to use Intel chips in all Apple Mac systems.

Will this hurt the adoption of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system growth? Probably not, but this move signals that Microsoft would like most Windows Vista customers to use non-Apple machines, like the commodity PCs from vendors like Dell, HP and Acer. Surprised? I'm not.

[Disclosure: I own MSFT shares as of 6-22-07]

One of Google's missions is to bring the world's information to everyone possible using any method possible. With that said, it's good to see that much of what Google produces in terms of product can be accessed by customers using either the Windows operating system or the Apple Mac operating system. Is this a coincidence? Hardly.

Most of what Google produces is platform-agnostic, and that's by design, of course. The platform used by Google is the web browser -- the operating system is an afterthought in a manner of speaking. Yes, there are Google applications like Google Earth and Google Picasa that are actually installed programs -- not web-based ones.

But still, most of the great stuff Google produces just needs a standards-compliant web browser (that's an oxymoron). If you use Windows XP, MacOS X, Linux, Unix, FreeBSD, you name it -- most of the Google universe is available to you with an Internet connection and a web browser.

The point made in the source article is that soon, many questions about "software" won't be mentioned as in "for Windows or Mac." Soon, it may take on the phrasing of "Windows, Mac or Google." That's an odd thought, but true. Just like the Internet itself, Google has designed and is designing everything to be universally open and accessible from almost every possible angle.

As a GOOG investor, this is a key thing to keep in mind -- the barriers to entry are almost non-existent and the product release schedule is not dictated by any third party. Google may just be the next operating "system".