After taking a look at a Computer Daily News article, we have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, Apple Computer "finished strongly in fifth spot" for overall sales, only under 1000 computers short of the tied third place sellers, Hewlett Packard and Acer. Compaq, unsurprisingly, was first, capturing 14% of the market, followed by IBM with 9.4%. Sure, Apple's 6% may not look terrific in comparison, but it's still a solid performance, and it shows growth is still the word of the day.

The bad news is that these figures pertain to the Australian market. Well, okay, that's not exactly bad news-- after all, Australia's a great, big country and Apple should be thrilled to be fighting for third place there. It's just that we'd seen other web sites mistakenly report this data as if it were based on U.S. sales figures, which would be fantastic, if not just a little out of whack given the recent PC Data January reports. Remember, the "classic" iMacs slid into fourth place last month here in the U.S., and the flavored iMacs didn't even make the top 15; we don't see how it would be possible for Apple, then, to have magically have fallen just short of third place in overall sales. But it sure as heck is something to shoot for.

In fact, we're finding Apple's increased popularity in overseas markets to be a very encouraging sign. For instance, it was recently pointed out that Apple finally captured the number one spot in Japanese retail sales a few weeks ago, propelled to the top by the overwhelming success of the iMac there; Apple recently announced that as many as 60% of Japanese iMac buyers are new to the Mac platform, which is exactly the kind of thing we love to hear. Number one in Japan, vying for number three in Australia-- say, things are looking up. We haven't even seen Apple referred to as "beleaguered" in the press, lately; that's probably the one sure sign that the darkest days are well past us all.