Ah, statistics; it's all in how you interpret them. Numbers dance with a mere change in attitude. Take, for instance, last week's Internet Retailer article which reported that according to Nielsen/NetRatings, Apple's web site completely obliterated all other computer hardware manufacturers' sites when it came to sheer volume of traffic; for the week of May 11th, Apple.com was loaded by "3.75 million unique visitors," which comes out to "73.7% of all visitors to hardware sites." Hewlett-Packard came in a distant second at 2.47 million visitors, with Dell next at 1.94 million. At the same time, though, visitors to Apple's site stayed only an average of 3 minutes and 48 seconds before leaving again, whereas visitors to HP stuck around for just over fifteen minutes, and Dell kept people hanging around for 8:44.

Okay, so how should you interpret these factoids? Well, if you're a Mac pessimist, try this on for size: Apple's high number of visitors but low average visit length reflects a ton of traffic from Wintel users who stopped by to check out the iTunes Music Store and then immediately bailed when they found out there's no Windows version yet. Then there are all the visits by intrigued Wintel potential switchers who, upon arriving, didn't like what they saw and left Apple's site without buying a Mac. By extension, visits to Wintel sites are longer because people are actually buying stuff. Which just means that Apple's market share will keep on shrinking, the company will eventually collapse under the weight of its own irrelevance, and we'll all be doomed to spend the rest of our short, miserable lives dealing with Wintel dreck and eating wet cigarette butts in the dark like a dog.

On the other hand, if you're a Mac optimist, you might instead choose to interpret the data thusly: HP and Dell receive longer visits than Apple because their web sites, like their computers, are poorly designed by dyslexic spider monkeys on Xanax, so it takes people a lot longer to find what they're looking for. And it's a pretty safe bet that Mac users on average better grasp the concepts of "time is money" and "you get what you pay for," so more of them have shelled out for broadband connections so can get what they need in a hurry; meanwhile, more Wintel users are still puttering around on dial-up connections and taking half an hour to download a firmware update. There's also some room for interpretation in just what Nielsen means by "unique visitors"; the huge disparity in the numbers between Apple's site and those for Dell and HP may mean that while each Apple user is indeed a unique and shining example of rugged individualism, most Wintel users simply count as a single homogeneous beige featureless mass. Just a thought.

So how do we interpret the numbers? Well, personally, down here at the AtAT compound we think they reflect a high percentage of assimilated alien life forms visiting Apple's site-- aliens with a much more evolved aesthetic sense than that of the average mouth-breathing human troglodyte As for the short visit lengths, we chalk it all up to the fact that most assimilated aliens in our society today are required by the mothership to complete an Evelyn Wood speed-reading course immediately after assuming human form. However, there's the slightest chance that we may be wrong.