Well, the first Frednote in recent memory has come and gone, yet there's been precious little coverage of the performance of Apple's CFO. Oh, sure, The Mac Observer has detailed notes on all the juicy new info that Mr. Anderson spilled to his audience at the Smith Barney Citigroup 2003 Technology Conference, but there's no mention of whether or not he killed. Did Fred captivate the crowd with his flashing pearly whites and the world's first juggling routine to incorporate a riding lawnmower, three pineapples, and an armed thermonuclear device? Enquiring minds want to know!

Okay, well, since no one's talking about Fred's remarkable balancing skills on a flaming unicycle, we're going to have to assume that he kept things toned down for the decidedly Wall Street audience. (If Steve ever lets him keynote a Macworld Expo, though, get ready for some no-holds-barred razzle-dazzle, boy howdy.) That means for now that we'll have to go against everything we stand for and focus on content over delivery. It's a darn good thing that we have no real convictions, or we'd probably feel some sort of inner turmoil right now. Whew, dodged a bullet on that one.

Anyway, there's a ton of spiffy info from Fred's keynote at both The Mac Observer and Mac Rumors, so we won't waste your time yammering about all of it-- we'll just waste your time yammering about a few choice tidbits, specifically ones relating to market share. First, the unquestionably happy stuff: Apple's education market share ticked upward to a vaguely respectable 16% last quarter, up a full percentage point from 15% the quarter before, and if you just count portables, Apple's share climbed from 24% to a whopping 30%-- which even beats Dell's numbers for schoolbound laptops. On the consumer front, however, we have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Apple has almost tripled its market share in the consumer market since two years ago. The bad news is that it "almost tripled" from a monumentally pathetic 1.2% slice of the pie to a merely woeful 3.5% one.

1.2%?! Let's think about that for a second; that means that of every 100 people out there buying a computer, only 1.2 of them were buying Macs-- and we all know how notoriously flaky those .2 people are when it comes to making the monthly payments. If you insist on thinking in terms of entire people, it means that out of every 500 mass-market computer buyers in early 2001, Apple only managed to corral six, which is, as we mentioned earlier, the very dictionary definition of "monumentally pathetic." We weren't aware it had gotten so bad. Thank goodness we're only hearing about this after the tripling, because if we'd heard about the 1.2% figure earlier, we might well still be struggling to emerge from the ensuing coma. (Say, is it too late to claim that's what caused our epic eleven-week hiatus? It is? Nurtz.)

That said, why dwell on the past? Fred reportedly sees a lot of growth potential in Apple moving forward, and not just in the consumer and education markets; the company is apparently targeting both small business and enterprise buyers, and the advent of a Mac OS X-native QuarkXPress and the new G5 is expected to throw creative pro sales back into high gear, too. The future is wide open, the road ahead is clear, and the sky's the limit. Why, with a lot of hard work and more than a little luck, by this time next year we bet Apple can push its overall market share to-- dare we say it?-- 4%. Dare to dream...