It's Thanksgiving Eve, and Apple's shareholders have too many blessings to count-- so why not toss one more on the pile? Faithful viewer mrmgraphics dished us the latest in a long line of recent Wall Street analyst Apple-loving gushfests, a 27-page note penned by Needham & Co.'s Charles Wolf which, as Macworld UK reports, tells his clients that if a flash-based iPod debuts early next year as expected, iPod sales will likely reach 23.5 million units by 2006. After crunching some numbers, he predicts that "100 million Windows users" will be iPod owners by 2008, and "Mac sales could surge if only a nominal fraction of this group make a purchase." (A poll conducted by Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray indicates the Mac defection rate of iPod-owning Windows users could be as high as 13 percent-- and there ain't nothing nominal about that fraction.)

Because of that and a zillion other positive factors (like greater economies of scale and the fact that "there are no compelling economic reasons why Microsoft's Windows Media Audio music software platform should end up dominating this market just because it's been adopted by a host of online music stores and music players"-- we love this guy!), Wolf raised his target price on AAPL to $62 per share... which drove the stock's price up another $2.78 to settle at $64, thus rendering his own prediction obsolete so quickly you'd think it was a Coleco Adam. So yeah, AAPL shareholders have even more to grin about during their Thanksgiving caloric orgy.

And Apple's not the only company enjoying iPod-related Wall Street success; USA Today reports on the "iPod economy," noting Apple's meteoric stock performance based almost entirely on the iPod phenomenon-- and points out that "it's not just Apple" reaping the benefits. PortalPlayer, the company that makes the chips used in iPods, went public last week with an initial share price of $17, which has ballooned to over $31 in just four days of trading despite the fact that the company "lost money the past three years." And Synaptics, the company that cranks out the iPod's Click Wheel, has seen its stock price just about triple from $13 to nearly $39 in the past year. Somehow we don't think that's a coincidence.

Indeed, just a hint of an association with the iPod is apparently enough to boost a stock's price these days; SigmaTel's shares are up roughly 40 percent since the beginning of October when an analyst first claimed that the company would be selling chips to Apple for the rumored new flash-based iPod. EETimes recently reported that SigmaTel had raised its forecast for the current quarter, "due primarily to stronger-than-expected sales of the company's portable audio SoCs into leading portable digital audio player manufacturers"-- including Apple, or so the rumor goes. As of yet SigmaTel hasn't mentioned an Apple contract and no iPod has SigmaTel guts in it, but that hasn't stopped investors from giving the share price a healthy little lift.

So where will it all end? Well, hopefully with your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff eventually cashing out and suddenly being able to afford a fleet of private jets, our own midsize island nation, a solid gold three-story-high statue of Christopher Walken, or perhaps even-- dare we say it?-- a semester of private college for Anya in 2019. Maybe even two. But we're trying not to get our hopes up, here.