Great jumpin' lobotomized tree sloths, it's Enderle Time once again! Yes, Enderle Time, that joyous periodic occasion on which we celebrate the latest anti-Apple ramblings to spew forth from analyst Rob Enderle, who at this point is clearly just poking Mac users with sticks in hopes of stirring up a little web traffic-- but hey, since his drivel is so gosh-darn amusing, we see no reason not to give him what he wants. It's the least we can do to repay him for the belly laughs.

Faithful viewer sinjin notes that in his TechNewsWorld article this week, Enderle starts out slowly by making a series of borderline-reasonable statements, just to suck you in: true, IT people don't like Apple; yes, some Mac fans do "love the products but hate the company"; sure, plenty of people are upset that they're buying brand new Macs and finding that they still need to shell out a couple of sawbucks for a copy of Panther. We're even willing to concede that some people may, indeed, be balking at buying their music at the iTunes Music Store because the only portable player said music currently supports is the iPod.

And then, once he's got you fooled into thinking he's suddenly gone sane (albeit in a curmudgeonly sort of way), he grabs you by the scruff of the neck and yanks you soundly into the Land of Flapdoodle.

Check out this Enderliffic gem, folks: "This impression that Apple is out to lunch from an open-systems perspective is enhanced by Steve Jobs publicly saying that the Tablet PC is a niche product." Uhhhhh, well, considering that any Wintel manufacturer can build one and demand is so freakin' close to nonexistent that only about 100,000 Tablet PCs sold worldwide during the product's first eight months on the market, we'd have to wonder just what does constitute a "niche product" in Enderle's twisted world view. To put that number in perspective, during the same era, Apple (with its "inconsequential" market share) sold 133,000 Power Macs in just three months-- well under half the time. And this was during a period when Apple's Power Mac sales were in the proverbial toilet, having fallen 20% thanks to Motorola's mantra of "Clock Speed? What's Clock Speed?" and Quark porting XPress at the speed of sludge.

In other words, if the Tablet PC isn't a niche product, then last year's Power Mac G4 must have been a freakin' chart-topping blockbuster by this guy's standards. But logic holds no sway over He They Call Enderle, and he goes on to call Jobs's comment "sadly ironic, given that Apple gave up the PDA market to Palm and Microsoft as a result of one of his decisions. Apple has nothing like... the Tablet PC. The iPod is terrible as a PDA [and] the company has no smartphone." Why, it's a veritable tour de force of inane blather, and it just shines like a jewel, doesn't it?

Let's ignore the rumors that Apple has a tablet on tap for next year and assume that, despite the nagging presence of Inkwell in Mac OS X, Apple doesn't want to enter a market with less demand than that for pre-used Kleenex. Likewise, let's assume that the iPod is "terrible as a PDA" because it isn't one (we picture Enderle trying to enter contact info with a stylus on the iPod screen while saying "duh" a lot) and Apple doesn't have a smartphone because, as Steve has said on numerous occasions, it might be wise to let the phone companies make the phones.

Nevertheless, Enderle prattles on by saying that "like a lot of CEOs, Jobs seems to think it is more important not to admit he was wrong than to correct a mistake." Oh, right, of course! Just like Jobs never publicly admitted he was wrong about the Cube and corrected the mistake by pulling the award-winning but slow-selling product off the market. And just like he never admitted to the press that he was wrong to have underestimated the importance of CD-RW and digital music, or corrected that mistake by introducing iTunes, finally putting burners in Macs, eventually shipping a portable digital music player that redefined the genre, and finally getting the dinosaur music industry to step boldly into the mid-nineties and allow Apple to sell 20 million song downloads in seven months or anything.

Oh, wait-- it's exactly like that. Never mind.

So if we can grossly oversimplify for a moment by lumping Tablet PCs in as PDAs on steroids (what Jobs gets and Enderle apparently doesn't is that the only people buying Tablet PCs are the same people blowing $500 on tricked-out PDAs so they have something cool to carry into their meetings), the question before us is this: was Steve wrong to nix the Newton and keep Apple out of the PDA fray? Longtime viewers already know that we here at the AtAT compound mourned the loss of Newton as much as anybody, and whined incessantly for a new Apple handheld to replace it-- but looking back, we can't see Steve's decision as anything but 100% the right thing to do. The PDA market tanked just as Steve foretold; once the novelty wore off, people stopped spending hundreds of dollars on yet another clunky device they'd have to remember to lug around with them. And, again just as Steve foretold, people are using their mobile phones to do 90% of everything that they would have used a PDA for in the first place.

Steve's choice was not to build yet another phone or yet another PDA, but rather to support existing phones and PDAs in Apple's "digital hub" strategy via iSync, a low-risk strategy that's paying off by letting Mac users get the most out of their handheld digital devices. (We happen to be PDA geeks ourselves, and we're perfectly thrilled with our Treos and iSync; it's a solution that just works.) Yet despite Palm's stock dropping by a couple orders of magnitude and nearly getting delisted (believe us, we know firsthand-- ouch) and Handspring surviving only by ditching its Visor PDAs and transitioning to Treo "smartphones" (before getting bought by Palm, who said "oh crap, that's what we should have been doing"), Enderle still thinks that Apple needs to be in that business.

Enderle himself says that "there is often a thin line between thinking outside of the box and going completely bonkers." You know what? He's right. It's just that he's standing on the opposite side of that line that he thinks he is.

Say, it's been a while since we last checked in with an iTunes Music Store sales update, and that used to be a mainstay in the Apple-flavored melodrama biz, so what say we scope the skinny on the millions tip? (No, we're not sure what that means, either.) CNET corroborates a figure mentioned in that Jobs interview in Rolling Stone to which we incoherently linked yesterday: reportedly the iTMS has now sold 20 million songs since it launched at the end of last April. Why, that's enough to fill 2,000 top-of-the-line iPods! Which is either a lot or not so much, depending on how you look at it.

Now, as you all know, the iTMS represents a whole new way to distribute music, and it's struggling to build some street cred so that people don't look at it as just another hula hoop-style fad that'll fizzle by March. The best way to do that, of course, would be for iTMS sales to overtake sales of traditional physical CDs. The thing is, 20 million songs since April may not sound like a lot when compared to the number of songs Americans buy on CD in a year (10 billion, apparently), but hey, it's still a significant pile in its own right, and a journey of 10 billion steps starts with... um... well, it probably starts with some sort of travel itinerary or something, and maybe a really fine CamelBak, but we're sure there's 20 million steps in there somewhere. And besides, Apple still has over three months to go before its first year is up-- and it only has to sell another 9,980,000,000 in that time to catch up. How hard can that be, right?

Of course, our math's a little rusty, but we suspect that in order for Apple to hit that goal, sales would have to accelerate just slightly.

Let's try to work this out, shall we? As of October 16th, Apple tells us that it had sold "more than 13 million" songs. Just a few days later on October 20th that had climbed to "14 million ." Fast-forward two and a half weeks to November 6th and the total had come to "more than 17 million." And then, as of yesterday, another four and a half weeks of sales had upped the total to 20 million. So after the introduction of iTunes for Windows, it sounds like Apple had been selling roughly 2 million songs a week, then about 1.2 million a week, and most recently maybe 860,000 songs a week.

Waitaminnit-- call us crazy, but those numbers look like they're getting smaller. We're not experts or anything, but that's the general sense we get by looking at them; we'd have to consult a statistician or something to find out for sure. If they are shrinking, though, then we imagine that might be a slight bump in the road on the way to eclipsing CD sales. In order to reach that lofty goal, by our figuring, Apple needs to increase its weekly sales rate just a smidge-- to about 670 million songs a week. By Thursday. Kind of tough if sales are tapering off.

But here's how we can make it happen: by our estimates, if every AtAT viewer commits to buying a mere 40,000 songs each week between now and the end of April, Apple can pull it off! And remember, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to spend $40,000 a week; why, with some albums containing fifteen or even twenty songs for a flat $9.99, you'd probably only have to cough up about $30,000. Okay, maybe $35,000. So get spending!

Okay, so iTunes Music Store sales may be shrinking a bit; don't let it bum you out. Remember, Apple probably loses a little money on every song sale-- it's only peddling tunes in the first place so that it can sell more iPods, which do make money. And get this: according to a new Jupiter Research press release, "U.S. shipments of MP3 players will almost double in 2003 to over 3.5 million, and will continue to grow almost 50% per year for the next three years." Growth of 50% per year? Sweet. Considering that the iPod is already the market leader in both unit sales and revenue, provided Apple doesn't screw it up in some epic and monumental way, it ought to keep bringing in some serious moolah, iTMS performance notwithstanding.

Of course, one surefire way of "screwing up in an epic and monumental way" would be to stand still. The iPod is finally just starting to get a little decent competition, most notably in the form of the Dell Digital Jukebox, which doesn't have half the style or elegance, but it does have three-quarters the cost-- and twice the battery life. With demand for digital players expected to skyrocket over the next few years, it's absolutely crucial that Apple not get complacent about that "number one in market share" thing and sit around daydreaming until that Number One drops to Number Twelve.

The good news here, of course, is that Apple has never stood still with the iPod. The company had improved it (well, mostly improved it) multiple times and in substantial ways long before anyone else had even managed to catch up to the first model, so there's every chance that the iPod will continue to evolve with new innovations that'll continue to keep it at the head of the pack from technological and ease of use standpoints. Of course, even that won't guarantee continued success, since demand continues to grow while the wealth of the population doesn't. Let's face it, most of the people willing to shell out at least $299 for a portable music player probably already have. This increasing demand for MP3 players that Jupiter Research is talking about is going to be showing up among people who just aren't going to want to blow that kind of cash.

So if Apple's going to compete, it probably is going to have to figure out a way to sell at least some iPods at a much lower price. MacRumors recently reported on unconfirmed rumors that a "low-end/cheaper 5 GB iPod" might appear "as early as the November 28th, 2003 In-Store Apple event." Of course, that didn't come to pass... but we've got a strong feeling that a modestly-featured and modestly-priced new entry-level iPod is indeed in the offing. Furthermore, we've got a strong feeling that Apple doesn't want to introduce it until after the holiday buying season, since existing iPods are already selling like disposable razors at the annual Covert Werewolves convention and it'd be just plain dumb to sabotage high-margin sales by shipping a lower-cost option now. But if there's some sort of largish Apple-related trade show or something taking place shortly after the holidays, we've got a strong feeling that it might be a good venue at which to unveil this conjectured low-cost wonder.

Disclaimer: we also had a strong feeling that Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever would be box office gold, so don't hold us to anything.