"Enough with the kvetching about the PowerBook delays!" you yell. "So Apple has to sell last year's model for a few extra months; what's the big deal?" Well, lookee here, Captain Stubing, this issue goes way beyond just having the latest and greatest or meeting some arbitrary product refresh schedule. You want Apple's market share to rise above its current piddly 3%-or-whatever levels, right? Okay, then-- portable sales are responsible for an ever-increasing chunk of Apple's overall revenue (they were just a hair short of half of all Mac sales last quarter), and with unit shipments on the rise in the first two quarters of this calendar year (and it being the Year of the Notebook and all), PowerBooks are a key player in Apple's fight to win the hearts, minds, and wallets of people in its most important market: People With Money.

See, check it out: faithful viewer mrmgraphics tipped us off to a CNET article about IDC's latest sales data, which shows that last quarter, worldwide notebook sales increased 22.4% from the year before. People With Money are buying portables, and it's obviously in Apple's best interest if as many of those portables as possible are PowerBooks. The good news is, some of them are; Apple took fifth place in the U.S. market, snagging a 7% slice of the pie. And that may not look like much at first glance, but when you consider that it's over twice Apple's share of the personal computer market all around, that 7% starts to look pretty darn good. In other words, at least in the U.S., PowerBooks (and iBooks) are doing twice as well as Macs overall.

And consider this: in the same calendar quarter in which notebook sales grew industry-wide by an impressive 22.4%, Apple's PowerBook sales increased by a staggering 71%. Clearly the aluminum PowerBooks were a huge hit, Apple was way ahead of the industry curve, and if it could just stay there, market share would continue to increase. Unfortunately, in this quarter, our concern is that People With Money might be thinking that the aluminum PowerBooks are starting to look a little tired, and the titanium 15-incher has hobbled right past "tired" to collapse in a ragged heap on top of "Rip Van Winkle's Got Nothin' On Me." (We're hoping the continued presence of the PowerBook in the Apple Store Top Ten indicates that perceptions aren't as bad as all that, but hey, we're worrywarts. It's what we do.)

Even then, perception isn't everything. Whether or not customers are actually willing to buy aging PowerBooks is largely moot, since by most accounts, the retail channel is so dry that people are making jerky in it. Sure, you can still order a PowerBook from the Apple Store and get it in 3-5 business days, but regular People With Money are far more likely to choose a notebook from those in stock at CompUSA or Best Buy, and reportedly that means "anything but a PowerBook." So between reduced supply and reduced demand, you can pretty much bank on PowerBook sales taking a vicious beating this quarter-- maybe even part of next quarter, if the "not until mid-October" rumors turn out to be true.

Alas, there's nothing sadder than lost momentum-- especially since if Apple winds up slipping out of the Top Five when the next quarterly notebook sales numbers show up, it'll probably get eclipsed by the current sixth-place finisher: Gateway. Oh, the horror; how will we face the neighbors? Can somebody please light a small, controlled fire under Motorola's inert hinder so we can all avoid such a tragic fate?