Throughout the first several months of Apple's recent recovery, just about every piece of news coverage discussing a step forward on the company's road back to health also postulated that the whole struggle was pointless, since the company was dead/irrelevant anyway. Once the iMac started kicking major hinder, though, we noticed more and more media coverage that accepted that Apple was back, and with a vengeance; there was a lot less of the "Apple posts third straight profit, still on deathbed" kind of thing going on. However, with the recent highly-publicized downgrades of Apple's stock by a couple of big-name financial analysts and the news that the iMac dropped in relative sales popularity last month, we were wondering if we're entering a new era of negative spin.

Certainly the fact that the iMac dropped from its king-of-the-hill position in November sales to third place for December had a few remaining Apple-negative holdouts screaming "I told you so!" with glee. But we won't know for sure whether this marks the turning point in the iMac popularity story until we see how sub-$1000 Bondi blue units and $1199 fruit-flavor ones affect the sales numbers, so reports of the iMac's "death" are at this point greatly exaggerated. Regardless, it's an opening for all kinds of anti-iMac backlash, which might get pretty ugly if the January numbers show a continued downward slide for the iMac's popularity. In the meantime, though, PC Data seems to be in the iMac's corner, given the positive vibes in their recent press release.

Here's the feel-good fact for Apple's feel-good computer: despite the December downturn, the iMac was still the number one selling personal computer (both at retail stores and via mail order) during the October-through-December holiday shopping season. Apparently those November sales figures were huge. For the holiday quarter, the iMac beat out offerings from Compaq and Hewlett Packard to grab the top spot, increasing Apple's market share to 9.6 percent. That's compared to 6.7 percent in the quarter six months before. And in a further distinction, the iMac was the only computer to make the top-five list each and every month since its introduction. Whaddaya know? Some positive spin, thanks to PC Data. Bring on the January figures!