Meanwhile, how exactly is it that Apple's share of the U.S. consumer market only comes to 3.5% when Apple is apparently the epitome of cool? As faithful viewer mrmgraphics points out, WIRED reports that "youth marketing experts" such as Look-Look have determined that the country's young 'uns have crowned Apple "one of the coolest companies in America." Look-Look polled 20,000 net-savvy whelps aged 13 to 35 (35?! Hey, apparently we're still young! Who knew?), and a majority of them chose Apple as the "company they would most like to endorse" if they were famous-- over Coca-Cola, Levi's, and Nike. The iMac and iPod were also voted tops in the "extremely well-designed products" category.

And look-look here-here, the Lambesis Research Group's L Style Report concurs; Apple is a "core trendsetter brand" among 15- to 34-year-olds. Youth Intelligence agrees as well, stating that Apple has a "high profile among young people." None of this comes as all that much of a shock, we suppose; Jon Ive's designs drip so much cool you need to keep 'em on a coaster or risk ruining your carpet, although we'd always felt that the Mac's relative lack of game support lost it a ton of points with the whippersnapper crowd. So what's going on, here, and why is Apple still at 3.5% in the consumer market?

It turns out that there's a bunch of reasons, actually. The first is that Apple being "cool" with the nation's striplings apparently only just happened over the summer. The second is that the main reason why Apple has youth appeal is the iPod, not the Mac, and massive sales of iPods have zero direct effect on Apple's share of the personal computer market. The third is that even if the Mac is ultra-hip among the youngsters, the really young ones are presumably at the mercy of their parent's decidedly less-cool judgment when it's time to go buy the family computer; we're guessing there aren't too many 13-year-olds dropping a thou on an iBook down at the local Apple retail store.

The hope, though, is that this is the start of something big and that Apple can somehow escape the Warhol effect and stay cool with the youth crowd for longer than fifteen minutes. If it can, then revenue from the consumer sector ought to skyrocket in the coming quarters. Or maybe not; after all, market share and coolth are largely mutually exclusive. The majority is rarely cool; cool stands alone. Case in point: there was only one Fonz. Aaaaaay.