Wait a minute, this just in-- it's TIME TO PANIC!! So go nuts! If you're a traditionalist, scream your head off, rend your clothes from your body, take to the streets in tatters and charge blindly into traffic while sobbing uncontrollably. If you're the type that likes to get a little more creative when all hell breaks loose, feel free to express your breathless hysteria with a jar of pickles and a big box of Styrofoam packing peanuts. Whatever. But the time to freak out is officially upon us.

What's that? Slightly less than half of you were already doing all that because of the election results? Oh. Well, carry on, then. But the rest of you had better get caught up with the whole Stampede o' Terror routine, because as it turns out, the iPod isn't bulletproof after all.

(Metaphorically speaking, that is. We have no idea if an iPod could stop an actual bullet and we hope that nobody's sick enough to find out. That brainless mook shooting up an iMac is about all the intentional violence against Jonathan Ive's designs we think we can stomach in a lifetime.)

Here's what we're on about: even as Apple's stock price rises on strong iPod demand heading into the holiday shopping season, The Mac Observer reports that Apple's share of the portable music player market actually fell during the month of September. As in, it went down. Impossible, you say? And yet it happened: Apple had 65.8 percent of the market in August, but only held onto 58.6 percent in September. And if you look at sales of just hard drive-based players, Apple's share slid from 92.0 percent to 87.3 percent. That means that not only are more people deciding to buy flash-based players, but also that a higher ratio of people who are sticking with hard drive-based units are now opting for non-Apple products. Scream like you mean it.

There is a silverish lining, however, which is that of the 4.7 percentage points Apple lost in the hard drive player market, 3.6 of them went straight over to Hewlett-Packard and the Apple iPod + hp. In other words, the iPod still holds over 90 percent of that market, although Apple shares it with HP now. (The better news is that HP's 3.6 percent market share actually lands it in second place; Rio's in third with 2.8 percent, Creative took fourth with 2.6 percent, and iRiver grabbed fifth with 1.5 percent. And Dell and Sony are splitting a pizza in Nowheresville.)

But the panic is still justified, because according to analyst Steven Baker, "the September numbers were highly affected by the release of the fourth-generation iPod"-- and if Apple's sales were boosted by a product refresh and the company still lost market share, that points to trouble ahead. Indeed, according to Baker, "while the iPod is doing extremely well, expanding that market any more is extremely tough. It's about as high as you can go." In other words, the iPod's market share might one day drop to-- dare we utter the unspeakable?-- 55 percent. Maybe even 50. Aiiiieeeeeeeeee!!

So maybe the previously-quoted estimate of 2.68 million iPods to be sold during the holiday quarter isn't insanely conservative after all. Here's hoping that demand doesn't peter out just when Apple needs the momentum to carry itself forward; we're mildly relieved to remember that Apple says it exited September with all iPod models on backorder (so from a numbers perspective, it didn't sell as many as people wanted to buy), but that doesn't mean Apple's market share won't drop to a mere seven, six, or even a piddling five times that of its nearest competitor. Our memory gets foggy when we hyperventilate-- which presidential candidate supports Mandatory iPod Purchase legislation again?