When RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky downgraded his Apple rating on Monday — helping spark the sharpest selloff in the company’s shares in eight years — he cited a survey that RBC conducted with ChangeWave that suggested that sales of Apple’s hot-selling computers were cooling off.

RBC’s version of the survey showed that the percentage of technology consumers who plan to buy a Mac in the next 90 days had dropped from 34% in August to 29% in September, the biggest such decline in more than two years.

ChangeWave’s version, which was released Monday here and is displayed in the chart above, focused on corporate purchase plans. It’s based on a survey of 1,947 individuals involved with IT spending within an organization and shows declines in the percentage of companies planning to buy Apple desktop or laptop computers over the next 90 days — from 8% to 7% for laptops and from 6% to 5% for desktops.

[UPDATE: For an inside look at ChangeWave's consumer survey, see The survey that squashed Apple -- Part 2.]

These two bearish signals were enough to persuade Abramsky that it was time to downgrade Apple’s shares, from “outperform” to “sector perform.”

But in the context of the ChangeWave survey, Apple hardly seems to be performing like the rest of its sector. For one thing, Mac purchases have been trending up even as computer purchases across the board have been slumping, as indicated in this ChangeWave chart:

Moreover, in his write-up of the survey, ChangeWave research VP Paul Carton points out that the 1 point drop in corporate purchase plans for Macs was from a record high in May. He also notes that 18% of his respondents now say that their company is considering Apple for a future purchase, a 1 point increase. Finally, he adds:

“In an upbeat sign for Macs, respondents estimate that 18% of their company’s workforce would choose to use a Mac if it were left up to the employees themselves - triple the 6% who are currently using Macs.” (link)

So there are indeed signs of a cooling trend for Apple (AAPL), but it’s not at all clear that they justify an 18% drop in its share price. Dell (DELL), by comparison, dropped 5.9% on Monday and its ChangeWave chart is a disaster:

From the Changewave Alliance website:

ChangeWave runs a proprietary network of 15,000 highly qualified business, technology, and medical professionals referred to as the ChangeWave Alliance. Alliance members are credentialed experts in leading companies of select industries who spend their everyday lives working on the frontline of technological change. (link)

Apple shares suffered their sharpest fall in eight years Monday morning on the word of two analysts — including one whose record predicting the company’s performance is mixed at best.

By 10:30 a.m ET the stock had dropped 16%, wiping out more than $18 billion in the company’s market capitalization in the space of 60 minutes. Apple closed at 105.26, down nearly 18%, its lowest level since May 2007.

The broader market also fell at the opening bell, and then more sharply after the financial bailout plan failed to pass in the U.S. House of Representatives. By the end of the day the Dow Jones Industrial average had lost more than 777 points, its worst point loss in history, down nearly 7%.

But even that paled next to the nosedive Apple (AAPL) took after Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty, citing slowing global consumer demand, cut her price target to $115 from $178 and her recommendation on Apple from “overweight” to “equal-weight.” (see Apple bruised in downgrades)

In a survey of eight leading Apple analysts last September, Huberty was rated the “worst” based on her ability to estimate the company’s quarterly sales (see chart at right). For fiscal Q2, for example, she predicted that Apple would sell only 1 million iPhones. Actual iPhone sales that quarter were 1.7 million. (see here)

The other analyst to downgrade Apple on Monday, Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital, has a considerably stronger track record. In fact, he is one of seven “star analysts” on Yahoo finance, based on the accuracy of his estimates of Apple’s earnings per share over the past two years. His estimated EPS for fiscal Q2, however, was off by 4.5%.

On Monday Abramsky downgraded the stock to “sector perform” from “outperform” and cut his price target to $140 from $200, citing a survey that showed a sharp decline in the percentage of consumers who plan to buy a Mac in the next 90 days.

Investors at The Mac Observer’s Apple Finance Board, who tend to be bullish on the stock, blamed the price collapse on short-sellers who dumped Apple shares even before news on the bailout vote came out.

Apple’s fiscal year ended on Saturday, Sept. 27. The company is expected to easily beat its guidance numbers on the strength of record sales of iPhones and MacBook computers. See, for example, here.

UPDATE: In a note to clients issued Monday afternoon, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster cited Huberty and Abramsky’s downgrades as the primary reason for Apple’s falloff, but downplayed their concerns. His bullet points:

1. Consumer is slowing, but Street models reflect the slowdown. Our FY08 Mac unit growth estimate is 40%, going to 16% in FY09. We expect Mac growth of 29% this quarter.
2. We believe margin pressure concerns will prove to be overblown. The Street is modeling for 32% gross margin in FY09, down from 34% in FY08. We expect margin guidance to be 30-31% for December, in line or above the company’s 30% gross margin guidance for FY09.
3. A disappointing preannouncement for Sept. is unlikely. We do not believe Apple will preannounce a disappointing September quarter. Our analysis of two months of NPD data on Mac and iPod, which has a 0.90 correlation, suggests 5% upside to Street numbers.

Chalk this one up to wishful thinking.

A leading Apple blog posted a rumor Sunday that the iPhone — which is currently available in the United States only through AT&T Wireless — could be coming to Verizon, perhaps as early as January 2009.

Cleve Nettles, writing in 9 to 5 Mac, says “negotiations between Apple and Verizon are ongoing but they expect to hammer out agreements by the end of the year.”

According to a “tipster” whom Nettles says “seems to know way too much about Verizon-Apple politics,” an announcement that a deal has been struck could be made at Macworld 2009.

That would be big news for millions of would-be buyers who are either locked into their Verizon accounts or reluctant to switch to AT&T (formerly Cingular), believing that AT&T’s wireless network is less mature.

But beyond the word of this unnamed tipster, Nettles’ argument rests on some pretty slender evidence.

He cites Apple job postings for engineers with experience in EVDO and CDMA, the wireless standards used by Verizon (and, for that matter, many foreign carriers). But he acknowledges that these skills overlap with those needed to work with AT&T’s GSM-based technologies and “could mean absolutely nothing.”

He also quotes Apple COO Tim Cook’s remarks that Apple “wasn’t married to the one carrier/country model.” But Cook wasn’t necessarily talking about the U.S. market; in fact, Apple has already abandoned that model in several foreign countries.

And Nettles marshals good reasons why Verizon might want to get over its initial resistance to working with Apple, or why Apple might want to reach the 55% of the domestic wireless market currently controlled by Verizon (VZ) and Sprint (S).

But he runs into a wall when it comes to what he correctly cites as the No. 1 reason people think a deal with Verizon is unlikely to happen soon: the reports that Apple and AT&T have signed a long-term exclusivity deal.

He dismisses these as “a couple of falsely reported rumors,” citing two USA Today articles, here and here.

Nettles is correct that these articles, both by USA Today reporter Leslie Cauley, are inconsistent. The first, which has been widely cited in subsequent reports, says that Apple (AAPL) gave AT&T (T) exclusive U.S. distribution rights for five years — i.e. until 2012. The second, based on an interview with AT&T chairman Randall Stephenson, says Apple got a one-year extension, to 2010.

Cauley’s reports may be inconsistent, but at least the second one appears to be well sourced, which is more than you can about Nettles’ rumor. (Pressed for detail, Nettles says that his tipster claimed to be from Verizon and therefore didn’t know much about the Apple-AT&T contract.)

If either date — 2010 or 2012 — is correct, a Verizon iPhone in 2009 is, unfortunately, a nonstarter.

Like nature, the Apple rumor mill abhors a vacuum, and for much of this month it has been filled with talk of “the Brick.”

What is the Brick? The question was first posed the day after Steve Jobs’ “Let’s Rock” keynote address by Cleve Nettles on the Apple blog 9 to 5 Mac. He wrote that a tipster with “a solid track record” told him that the mid-October introduction of a new line of MacBooks (see here) is “all about the Brick.”

“What does ‘The Brick’ mean?” Nettles asked his readers. “Can anyone out there help us out?” (link)

Readers were happy to oblige. Hundreds of messages, dozens of blog postings, and at least two reader polls later, no definitive answers have emerged. Speculation reached a fever pitch this weekend after The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) reported that Apple had e-mailed resellers with instructions to remove and destroy all Apple TV displays and literature by 5 p.m. Sept. 30, when a webcast “kick off” was supposedly scheduled. Could the Brick be the long-awaited arrival of Apple TV, Take 3?

The Sept. 30 deadline, it turns out, is the anniversary of the debut of those Apple TV store displays, which suggests that the company may simply be destroying some outdated print material containing screen shots whose permissions have run out. (link)

But that hasn’t slowed the flood of ideas about what Steve Jobs might have up his sleeve next. As is often the case with Apple watchers, the speculation says more about their needs and fantasies than Apple’s (AAPL) product plans.

So what’s on their wish list? A sampling of what some have suggested the Brick might be:

• An Apple TV with a built-in Blu-Ray disk, TV receiver, digital TV recorder and its own App store (link)
• A new Apple-branded gaming system (link)
• A Time Capsule with “smarts” that functions as an iTunes server (link)
• A redesigned and much more powerful Mac Mini (link)
• The announcement that Apple has aquired TiVo (TIVO) and is discontinuing the Apple TV (link)
• A tablet-sized Mac with a touch-screen keyboard (link)
• A low-cost MacBook to compete in the sub-notebook market (link)
• A wireless USB hub that that links keyboards, mice, DVD drives, networking, hard drives, new displays (link)
• Nothing brick-shaped, but rather a product or group of products sexy enough to “smash” Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows once and for all (link)

My favorite reader comment, posted by “cardiomac” on TUAW in response to a suggestion that the Apple TV was “not meant to be a computer,” borrows from the “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock“:

No! I am not a computer, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool. (link)

There were no queues of eager iPhone customers outside Cape Town’s Vodacom stores when doors opened at 8 a.m. Friday morning, but sales were reported to be brisk — despite steep prices and an administrative snafu.

“I don’t know how many people have come through our doors,” a salesperson told a correspondent for ITWeb. “But it has been really busy.” (link)

The iPhones are being sold unlocked because local law forbids carriers from binding cell phones to any particular network. Prices started at 6,389 Rand ($788) for an 8 GB model and 7,569 Rand ($934) for 16 GB. There was some confusion at first about the upgrade process for existing customers, but it was soon straightened out.

South Africa is the first of the third wave of countries to get the new phone this year — a wave that is crashing somewhat haphazardly compared with the first two.

Apple (AAPL) launched the iPhone 3G nearly simultaneously in 22 countries on July 11 and in another 22 countries on August 22. But the 29 countries that were on Apple’s official “Coming Soon” list on Monday seem be getting their phones in piecemeal fashion and with little fanfare. (see here)

The iPhone went on sale in Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Turkey and Brazil on Friday. It’s coming to Russia a week later, on Oct. 3.

There is no known schedule for the phone’s arrival in the remaining 24 countries. For more information, go to Apple’s site here and click on the button corresponding to the country you are interested in.

There are 29 colorful little buttons displayed on Apple’s “Coming Soon” page — its official list of countries where the iPhone 3G is scheduled to launch before the end of the year — and carriers in some of those countries have let it be known that their launch day is Friday, Sept. 26.

Whether the phone will come to the entire list — which runs the alphabetical gamut from Botswana to Venezuela — remains to be seen. It’s definitely coming Friday to Latvia and Lithuania, according to a press release issued Thursday by TeliaSoneria, the largest carrier in the region. Turkcell, Turkey’s largest carrier, announced Thursday that it was launching the iPhone there on Friday. And on Tuesday AppleInsider reported that local readers had confirmed that the device will be launched Friday in Brazil and South Africa. (Vodacom would only say that it expects to bring the iPhone to South Africa before the end of September.)

No news yet out of the biggest market on that list — Russia, with 127 million mobile subscriptions as of 2007 — and still no deals in China or South Korea.

[UPDATE: Russia's three major carriers will begin selling iPhones through at least two electronics chains starting at midnight Wednesday Oct. 3 for $923.60 (8 GB) and $1,084 (16 GB), without a contract, according to several reports (see, for example, here and here). Meanwhile, Voxmobile announced Friday that "Le iPhone 3G est arrivé a Luxembourg!" -- which is odd given that Luxembourg is not a country that appears on Apple's "Coming Soon" list.]

Apple has promised to bring the iPhone 3G to more than 70 markets before the end of the year. It launched the device in 22 countries (or in the cast of France, shortly after) July 11. It followed up with launches in 22 more countries on August 22, bringing the total to 44.

Its official list of “Now Available” countries, shown below, has 47 buttons, but that’s because Apple (AAPL) counts Belgium, Canada and Switzerland twice each.

If you get wind of a launch date in a country near you, drop us a line.

Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 3G and the G1 with Google (GOOG) unveiled on Tuesday have a lot in common.

Both are smart phones designed for users who want easier access to the Web than is offered by the current generation of RIM (RIMM) BlackBerries.

They share a lot of features — high res (320 x 480 pixel) color displays, motion sensors, support for GPS and Bluetooth 2.0, and venues for third-party apps. And they share some of the same flaws — both are locked to their respective networks, both lack video recording capability and full cut-and-paste text editing, to name just a few.

But there are real differences, which we’ve tried to summarize in the table below. If you spot something we’ve missed, let us know in the comment stream and we’ll update the chart.

Detailed specs are available for the G1 here and the iPhone 3G here.

Several sites have posted side-by-side video comparisons of the two devices from the noisy demo room below Tuesday’s press conference. Engadget, for example, compares the speed and responsiveness of the two Web browsers here.

NEW YORK - With a built-in keyboard and Google’s open-source Android platform, there may be many things the new T-Mobile G1 can do that Apple’s iPhone can’t. But at its long-awaited unveiling in New York City Tuesday, one feature stood out: Google Street View in Compass Mode.

Until now, you needed a computer to see the 360-degree panoramic street-level photographs of thousands of locations in the United States, France, Italy, Australia and Japan that Google began making available in May 2007. Google had previously demonstrated Street View on prototype phones running its Android operating system, but the G1 is the first commercial cellphone that has it built in.

Compass Mode on the new G1 takes Street View one step further. Rather than having to drag or click to navigate the images of a particular street corner, you just swing the phone up, down, left or right. The image on the screen shifts as the phone does, creating an effect not unlike the one you would get through the built-in camera if you were actually standing on that street corner, rather than just visiting it in cyberspace.

It’s very cool. And there’s no reason that Google (GOOG) couldn’t make it available on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone or the iPod touch.

But for now, if you want Compass Mode, you have to buy an Android phone.

T-Mobile’s G1 comes with a 1 GB memory card and and a removable battery. It will go on sale Oct. 22 for $179 with a 2-year contract. Unlimited Web browsing costs $25. For $35 you also get unlimited messaging.

You can see an early demo of Compass Mode here. For more on the G1s features, see Scott Moritz’s hands-on review here.

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, one of the most bullish — and closely watched — of the more than two dozen analysts who track Apple Inc., has raised his estimates for the company’s fourth quarter, which ends next Tuesday, Sept. 30.

Based on the latest retail sales data from the NPD Group, Munster writes in a report to clients issued Monday that he is “incrementally more confident” in Apple’s unit sales for its three main product lines and has raised his targets as follows:

• Mac units of 2.8 million (vs. 2.5 million previously) in Q4
• iPod units of 11 million (vs. 10.8 million)
• iPhone units of 5 million (vs. 4.1 million)

Added to the 2.4 million first-generation iPhones Apple sold in the first six months of 2008, that would bring the total number iPhones sold this year to 7.4 million.

Apple has repeatedly expressed confidence that it would sell at least 10 million iPhones in calendar 2008. Reports in early August that Apple’s Asian partners were turning out iPhones at the rate of 800,000 a week led some investors to speculate that the company might reach that goal before the end of September.

If Munster is right, either those reported manufacturing rates were wrong or production has slowed since August.

Munster also notes the iPhone this quarter will, for the first time, account for a “meaningful percentage” of booked revenue. Last quarter, which ended in June, the iPhone accounted for only 4% of booked revenue; this quarter, he estimates, it will account for 21%. To reflect this change, he is publishing a new metric that assumes that the full value of each iPhone sale is accounted for in the quarter in which it is sold (rather than spread out over two years, the life of the standard iPhone contract).

This new metric significantly boosts Apple’s earnings per share, at least on Piper Jaffray’s spreadsheets. For example, Munster on Monday increased his estimate of Apple’s fourth quarter earnings 13%, from his previous estimate of $1.04 a share to $1.17 a share (the Street estimate is $1.11 a share). But under his new metric, booked EPS would come in at $1.60 a share, up 15%. He summarizes these changes in the table at right.

Munster’s price target for calendar year 2009 remains unchanged at $250 a share (based on a booked EPS of $9.14 and a multiple of 27.4). That gives the stock considerable room for upside growth. Apple (AAPL) shares closed on Friday at 140.91, having traded as low as 121.5 the day before.

Judging by press reports and YouTube videos, the grand opening of Ireland’s first Apple Store was like any other — except with an Irish accent.

The faithful queued up by the hundreds and waited for hours, fortified by coffee and biscuits. Staffers in orange, black and blue whooped and hollered up and down the line. And when the doors finally opened at 9 a.m. on the upper ground floor of Belfast’s new Victoria Square mall, there where high-fives and free T-shirts for all.

The YouTube video pasted below captures the noise and excitement, but to get the full flavor of Northern Ireland’s home-brewed Mac cult — Apple logo calf tattoo and all — check out the BBC film report here.

“It’s mental,” says an Irish fanman with his fanboy son in tow. “It’s absolutely mental.”

For interior photos and a nicely written account, see Alan in Belfast’s blog entry here.

The Belfast store was one of five that Apple [AAPL] opened on Saturday — one in Lancaster, PA, one in Colorado Springs, CO, and two in California.

Screen grab courtesy of the BBC.