Here’s a tale of two demographics.

If you list the five bestsellers in Amazon’s “Computers and PC Hardware” category today, you get five netbooks — three ASUS Eees and two ACER Aspire Ones. That’s been the story pretty much all year.

If you list the five most popular items in “Computers and Software” on American Express’s shopAmex site, you get four Apple (AAPL) products — three MacBooks, one Apple TV and one Sony (SNE) Blu-Ray player.

The first non Apple computer on the AMEX site is No. 17, a Dell (DELL) Inspiron. The first Apple on the Amazon list is No. 14, a white MacBook.

Why the difference? The Amazon site is open to everyone and tends to attract bargain hunters. The AMEX site is open only to card members, and although it advertises 30% discounts, it’s attracting a different sort of clientele — one that doesn’t seem to be put off by Apple’s premium pricing.

Here are those lists:

It took Amazon (AMZN) less than a month after the release of the second-generation Kindle electronic-book reader to put a free Kindle application on the iPhone App Store. It took another two months for it to fix the app’s second most annoying drawback (after the iPhone’s tiny screen): the hoops you had to jump through to buy new titles.

Amazon solved that problem Monday morning by launching a Kindle store “optimized” for the iPhone. Before if you wanted to buy a book for the iPhone, you had to get it from your Kindle (if you had one), or from Amazon via a computer, or from Amazon’s site as viewed through the iPhone’s browser — not a user-friendly experience.

Now iPhone users can buy directly from within the Kindle application through a new interface that works like an iPhone app should and doesn’t require a magnifying glass.

It’s no mystery why Amazon keeps showing the iPhone its love. The company hasn’t released sales figures for either the Kindle 1 and the Kindle 2, but according to press reports, it has probably sold 700,000 to 800,000 of the devices in their first 18 months.

Apple (AAPL), by contrast, has sold some 37 million iPhones and iPod touches.

And since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has made it clear that he is far more interested in selling e-books than he is in selling Kindles, it makes sense for him to put his content on as many devices as he can — and to make reading that content as seamless as possible.

At the launch of the Kindle 2, Amazon VP Ian Freed said that the company was working hard to bring Kindle apps to a variety of existing smartphones, starting with the ones that offer the best reading experience.

Apparently that was the iPhone, because there’s no sign yet of a Kindle app for Research in Motion (RIMM), Android (GOOG), Symbian (NOK) or Mobile Windows (MSFT) phones.

UPDATE: iLounge’s Charles Starrett points out that there could be a small wrinkle in the Apple-Amazon relationship: By selling its e-books directly to readers, Amazon may have found a way to avoid the 30% cut Apple will start taking this summer when it opens the App Store to so-called ” in-app purchasing.”

The new Kindle store, writes Starrett, “appears to be a workaround to enable easy purchasing without Apple revenue sharing.”

See also:

• Amazon’s Kindle hits the iPhone
• Amazon’s Kindle: Did Steve Jobs blow it?
• Amazon unveils the new Kindle 2

Apple (AAPL) can take some satisfaction in the fact that it clobbered the Windows PC manufacturers in the customer experience survey released last week by Forrester Research (FORR) — but not too much satisfaction.

The fact is, the computer industry as a whole fared pretty badly compared with, say, retailers and hotel chains. And even high-scoring Apple was ranked 23 out of 113, trailing the likes of eBay, Costco and BJ’s Wholesale Club.

The full report, available here (free registration required), is revealing. Some 4,500 U.S. consumers were asked about their interactions with a wide range of companies — from airlines to banks to insurance providers — and rate them according to their usefulness, ease of use and enjoyability.

Barnes & Noble, which scored the highest overall, was consistently rated “excellent,” as were Amazon, Target and USAA, which provides financial services for the armed forces and their families.

Apple, in the final tally, was merely “good.”

Drilling into the full report, we see that Apple did manage to score an “excellent” in ease of use — although just barely. It scored a solid “good” in usefulness. But in enjoyability, it was only “okay.”

Not that any of the other PC manufacturers came close. Where Apple’s overall score was 80% — some might call that a B minus  — Compaq, HP (HPQ), and Gateway ended up in D territory with between 63% and 66%. Dell (DELL) basically flunked with a “poor” 58% rating overall and a “very poor” 47% in enjoyability.

“I do think Microsoft’s software has a bit to do with it,” wrote the study’s author, Bruce D. Temkin. As a rule, he says, “consumers don’t distinguish problems with the operating system from problems with the PC manufacturer.”

“Bottom line,” writes Temkin, “the Windows ecosystem needs an extreme customer experience makeover.”

In the case of Dell, however, there was more going wrong than Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows. Temkin’s take: “Dell got so focused on operational efficiency that it lost sight of customer experience.”

But even Dell, at No. 93 on the list, looks pretty good compared with some of the Cable TV and Internet service providers. The ISPs are particularly well represented at the bottom of the list, with Time Warner Cable’s (TWC) Road Runner at No. 99, Comcast (CCS) at No. 105 and Charter Communications at No. 113.

Below the fold: the full list.

The stock is not what it was in 2007, when it rose nearly 136% in the space of 12 months, but Apple (AAPL) is off to a good start in 2009.

From Jan. 2, when it opened at $85.88, to April 2, when it closed at $112.71, Apple has gained 31.24% — easily outpacing the Dow, which is still down more than 9% for the year.

So how is Apple doing relative to the stocks it’s most often compared with, the so-called “Four Horsemen of Tech”? As the chart below shows, it has so far out-performed Google (GOOG) and Research in Motion (RIMM), but paled beside Amazon (AMZN), which is up 48%.

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Apple is nothing if not volatile, but not matter what happens there’s no way that 2009 could to end up looking like 2008, when its shares fell more than 56% and its market cap dropped nearly $100 billion. Apple’s enterprise value today is $71 billion and $28.8 billion of that is in cash and negotiable securities.

Apple opened at $113.75 and was up more than 2% in early trading Friday.

The big mover Friday, however, was RIM, which opened at $58.13, up nearly 20% following Thursday’s surprisingly strong fourth-quarter earnings report. That pushes it ahead of Apple in the Four Horsemen chart, but still trailing Amazon.

If there was ever any question that Amazon’s (AMZN) Jeff Bezos is more interested in selling books than selling Kindle electronic book readers, the answer showed up on the iTunes App Store overnight Wednesday: a free application to read Kindle books on Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

Given that there are more than 17 million iPhones in circulation and probably not more than a few hundred thousand Kindles, Amazon has, with a single stroke, vastly increased the size of its potential readership without necessarily boosting sales for its $359 reader.

The app, which you can download here, works pretty much as advertised. You can’t order books directly from the iPhone — you have to do that from a Kindle or through a Web browser. But once you’ve established that you have an Amazon account, the books you’ve ordered show up instantly — and wirelessly — on the screen, thanks to the magic of Amazon’s new Whispersync technology. If you’ve started to read a book on a Kindle, Whispersync is smart enough to remember what page you were on.

There are plenty of titles to choose from in the Kindle Books section of the Amazon store — more than 240,000, according to Amazon’s press release — although as you might expect, the list is heavily tilted toward current bestsellers (104 of the 112 titles on New York Times‘ list, most for $9.99 each).

At the store, you can arrange books by popularity (”The Shack” by William P. Young currently tops that list), customer review (Ron Paul’s “The Revolution”) or publication date (”Eye of the Beholder,” Jade Falconer).

But you get a better feel for the range of books available when you list them by price, high-to-low or low-to-high. The most expensive title is something called “Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems (Part 4),” which sells for $6,431.20. On the other end of the spectrum, there are pages and pages of books priced at $0.00, including Arnold Bennett’s “Sacred and Profane Love” and Hugh Dalton’s “With British Guns in Italy,” to name a couple at random.

The books are certainly readable on the iPhone, although I’m not sure anybody is going to make it through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 944-page “Team of Rivals” (No. 16 on the Kindle bestseller list) on a 3.5-inch screen. The pages are formatted for Kindle, not the iPhone, which creates some unfortunate typographical effects. At right, for example, is what the preface page of Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father” looks like on the iPhone, with an ugly and unnecessary break in the word “preface.”

All in all, the reading experience on Kindle for iPhone falls somewhere between Google’s (GOOG) free iPhone Book Search app, with 1.5 million titles to choose from but minimal formatting, and Andrew Kaz’s $2.99 Classics, which offers only a dozen or so books, but each of them specially formatted for the iPhone screen.

And that’s probably as it should be.

See also:

• Amazon unveils the new Kindle 2
• Amazon’s Kindle: Did Steve Jobs blow it?

Apple CEO Steve Jobs was pretty dismissive of Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader when it first came out. “The whole conception is flawed at the top,” he told the New York Times a little over a year ago, pointing out that 40% of Americans make it through one book a year or less. “People don’t read anymore.”

The launch Monday of the Kindle 2 after 14 months of strong sales — as many as 500,000 units, according to one analyst (Amazon does not release sales figures) — has led some second-guessing among Apple watchers.

“Why don’t we own this market?” asked one investor on The Mac Observer’s Apple Finance Board (AFB). “Apple had ALL the elements here, the capacity to design, the money to market, and the distribution system already in place via the App Store and the iTunes Store.” (link)

It’s an interesting question, with an unsual twist.  Although Apple and Amazon are both making white hand-held electronic devices these days, they come at it from very different directions.

Amazon (AMZN) is primarily an electronic retailer; it ventured into manufacturing with the Kindle to drive sales of titles from its huge online bookstore.

Apple (AAPL) is an electronics manufacturing company; it provides music, movies, apps and even some books on the iTunes Store primarily to drive sales of Macs, iPods and iPhones.

Both companies are profitable — but Amazon is much less so, which drives Apple investors crazy. Even as Wall Street has been rewarding Amazon for finally breaking into the black, it has been pummeling Apple.

“The Kindle is a good product.  Amazon is a good company,” wrote another commentator on AFB. “Notwithstanding that, the P/E disparity is staggering.”

He has a point. Check out the tale of the tape:

Apple is three times the size of Amazon and nearly four times as profitable, yet Amazon trades at 44.7 times earnings while Apple closed Monday at less than 20. And that’s not including the growing stash of deferred revenue Apple is squirreling away from sales of iPhones. (See Spotlight on Apple’s hidden revenue stream.)

Of course it’s not too late for Apple to get into the e-reader market, should its management team overcome its CEO’s skepticism about America’s reading habits.

Meanwhile, Amazon has signaled that it is willing, once some technical hurdles have been overcome, to let iPhone owners read the books in its electronic library — as long as they buy a Kindle first.

In fact, Jeff Bezos is convinced that anybody who tries to read a book on a smartphone will quickly see the virtue of a dedicated e-reader.

“If you are going to read for a couple of hours, you are going to have problems with battery life with a mobile phone, you are going to have eye strain and you are going to have problems with screen size,” he told the New York Times yesterday. “Reading is an important activity and deserves a purpose-built device.”

Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle has a skinny sister — the Kindle 2.

At a press conference Monday morning in Manhattan, CEO Jeff Bezos introduced a thinner, lighter and faster version of the company’s surprisingly popular handheld electronic book reader. The price is the same — $359 — and it goes on sale today for delivery in 15 days.

The new device looks very much like the old one, with these improvements:

• Thinner: 0.36 inches thick, 25% thinner than an iPhone
• Quicker: Turns pages 20% faster
• Longer lasting: 25% increase in battery life
• Better display: 16 shades of gray (was 4)
• Bigger memory: Stores up to 1,500 books
• Bigger vocabulary: Built-in 250,000 dictionary
• Better navigation: With a 5-way joystick
• More vocal: Able to read text aloud in a semi-robotic voice
• Less accident prone: The page-turn buttons are smaller and harder to hit by mistake
• More wired: New Whispersync technology (more below)

“We want the Kindle to disappear,” said Bezos before a packed audience in the basement of Manhattan’s Carnegie Library. “It’s designed so nothing interferes with that incredibly pleasurable mental flow-state you get into when you are reading a good book.”

Bestselling thriller author Stephen King read from new a short story — “Ur” — that is available, for now, exclusively on the Kindle. “I’m the entertainment,” he quipped.

The original Kindle allowed users to download books (standard price: $9.99) wirelessly from the Internet using a built-in 3G cellular modem.

The Kindle 2 goes one step further. The new Whispersync technology allows users to pause in their reading on, say, a Kindle 1, and pick up where they left off on a Kindle 2 and, eventually, on future wireless devices — a phrase Bezos left tantalizingly vague. Earlier reports suggested that the company’s electronic library of 230,000 books would be available on various cell phones including Google’s (GOOG) Android phones and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

Ian Freed, VP for Kindle, said the company was working “as quickly as possible” to bring Whispersync to a variety of existing smartphones, starting with the ones that offer the best reading experience. He declined to give a timeframe.

Amazon has never released Kindle sales figures, nor would its spokespeople confirm analyst estimates that it has sold as many as 500,000 units of the original model. The company had trouble keeping up with demand through much of 2008, especially after Oprah Winfrey endorsed the device on national television, calling it “my new favorite thing in the world.”

Click here for the press release.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s five grand worth of Apple (AAPL) news in charts and lists released over the past couple of days.

1. Web Brands. Apple scored No. 10 in Nielson Online’s ranking of the top Web brands based on the number of unique visitors each site drew in December 2008 — which isn’t bad considering Apple.com’s focus is so much narrower than the brands it’s up against, like Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Amazon (AMZN). (link)

2. Social Brands. The iPhone scored No. 1 — ahead even of its parent company at No. 3 — in the Vitrue 100, a new ranking launched this week by an Atlanta-based marketing company with a deliberately misspelled name. Vitrue’s list ranks blue chip brands by how often they get mentioned in blogs, photo-sharing sites and such social media entities as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter — presumably a measure of how large these names loom in the minds of an emerging category of early adopters.

3. Days to 1 Million. This comes from an Engadget reader named Noel F. who used published sales data to compare the rate at which the leading smartphones achieved the market penetration milestone of 1 million units. However, as Engadget’s Tom Ricker notes, this leaves out the important factor of geographical footprint at launch. The Google Android G1, for example, launched only in the United States. The iPhone 3G was released simultaneously in 21 countries. (link)

4. Volume vs. Revenue. CounterNotions’s Kontra uses data from GigaOm’s Jose Fermoso to demonstrate that what matters is not how many smartphones you sell, but how much you make on each sale. Unfortunately, both writers’ comparisons are a bit off since Apple’s Q1 numbers include revenue and earnings not just from iPhones, but also from Macs, iPods and other goodies.

5. Stock Price. Finally, a glance at Apple’s share price, which having suffered a thousand cuts in the past year finally picked up a little traction in the past two weeks.

Apple was the outlier Monday. On a day in which the Dow lost nearly 370 points (having plunged 800 points in midday trading), Apple’s shares actually ended up in positive territory, closing at $98.14, up 1.1%.

But to see that as good news you would have to ignore the fact that at one point Monday Apple was trading for $87.24 a share — off nearly 60% from its December 2007 high of $202.96.

Apple closed down nearly 9 points (9.5%) Tuesday, while the Dow fell more than 508 points (5.11%).

To get a feel for how Apple is really faring, you can compare its performance with what CNBC’s Jim Cramer calls the four horsemen of technology: Apple (AAPL), Research in Motion (RIMM), Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN).

As it turns out, the biggest loser over the past two weeks has been RIM, down 38.5% over the past 10 trading days — and off nearly 65% from its 12-month high.

The best performer of the four: Amazon, off only 9% for the fortnight, and within 40% of its 12-month high.

But Amazon’s price-to-earnings ratio is a dizzying 47, while Apple is now hovering around 20. That’s still above the market average, as Henry Blodget points out in Silicon Alley Insider, “but low for a stock with this wide and passionate a following and a still-solid growth story.”

Here’s a snapshot of the past two weeks of trading, taken before the markets opened on Tuesday:

Below: live fever charts for all four stocks.

The Macworld Conference & Expo, Silicon Valley’s largest technology trade show, opens Monday. But the moment everyone is waiting for comes Tuesday morning, when Steve Jobs makes his annual keynote address at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Jobs has set a high bar for himself. At Macworld 2006, he introduced the first Intel (INTC)-based Macs — sparking a burst of sales that nearly doubled Apple’s (AAPL) market share from roughly 4% to something approaching 8% (link). At Macworld 2007 he unveiled not just the all-but-forgotten Apple TV, but also the iPhone — a device that in nearly everybody’s book turned out to be the machine of the year.

What can Jobs do to top that?

There’s no shortage of speculation. The Apple rumor machinery has grown so elaborate that for the second year in a row, Ars Technica’s John Siracusa has published a keynote Bingo card (available in PDF format here and in iPhone format here), with boxes to be filled in as Jobs makes his announcements, introduces his guests and trots out his trademark rhetorical flourishes. (The rules of the game are spelled out here.)

Nobody has yet shouted out “Bingo!” in middle of a Steve Jobs presentation — a moment brilliantly anticipated in IBM’s buzzword Bingo TV ad (link) — but this could be the year.

Some of Siracusa’s boxes are obviously more important than others. A couple (Mac Pro and Xserve) were preemptively filled last week, and there are a few key possibilities that he missed. Watch especially for:

• A Skinny MacBook. Probably the leading candidate for Jobs’ one-more-thing moment, it’s already been named — Macbook air, thin, nano and mini — and imagined in PhotoShop (see here, for example) by bloggers who should know better. Likely specs: 12 to 13-inch. LED backlit screen, under 3 lbs., half as thick as today’s MacBooks, 32, 64 or even 128GB solid-state flash drive, priced around $1,600.
• iPhone updates. A bump in capacity from 8GB to 16GB and maybe 32GB is expected, as well as a preview of the software developers toolkit (SDK) promised for February; we might even get a few demos from developers, like EA, who were seeded with the SDK last fall. A 3G iPhone and a Newton-type tablet are reported to be in the works, but not yet ready for prime time.
• Movie rentals. This is the item Hollywood is following most closely. It’s been widely reported that Fox and Disney are likely to make movies available on iTunes for overnight rental (at $3 to $5 for 24 hours) or for purchase for roughly the price of a shrink-wrapped DVD. If, as rumored, Paramount, Lions Gate and Warner Bros join them, the flood of fresh video content could breath new life into the Apple TV. (The Associated Press reported Sunday that Netflix (NFLX), anticipating such a move by Apple, will offer unlimited monthly video streaming.)
• DRM-free Music. Having famously championed the cause with his February 2007 Thoughts on Music memo, it would be surprising — and disappointing — if Jobs did not use this opportunity to announce a significant expansion of the DRM-free offerings in the iTunes Store, especially after the last of the major labels announced last week that they were putting their music on Amazon.com (AMZN) without copy protection.
• Microsoft (MSFT) Office 2008. No surprises here, since the reviews are already in, but an excuse for what should be the most lavish after-hours party of the show.
• The Beatles. It’s about time. Just in case, Yoko Ono’s John Lennon Educational Tour Bus mobile recording studio is making the trip from its Las Vegas unveiling at the Consumer Electronics Show to be at Macworld. A few hours after Jobs’ speech, there’s a press reception in the bus that’s co-sponsored by Apple.

You already see the flashbulbs popping, right? But is it enough? Apple’s marketing machinery is like a shark that must keep swimming or die. Even if nearly every square on the Bingo card were to be filled on Tuesday, would Jobs have delivered the kind of innovation and buzz the faithful have come to expect?

And then there’s Wall Street to consider. Apple was the high-flying tech stock of year, its share prices having more than doubled in 2007. But as a CNNMoney headline put it on Friday, “What’ve you done for me lately?” The stock fell nearly 30 points over the last two weeks, which could be taken as a measure of traders’ uncertaintly. (Or it could just be a well-timed pause to set up the Macworld effect, the short-term bump tech share prices often enjoy after a Steve Jobs’ keynote.)

No matter how high the bar, Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg is confident that Jobs will clear it. “This is a company that thinks in terms of strategy,” he says. “Do I think they’ll deliver something as disruptive as the iPhone? No. You don’t achieve that kind of disruption every week; it would be tantamount to getting into a whole new industry. But somehow Jobs always manages to meet expectations, even if the expectations are different.”

To find out how different, tune in Tuesday for Fortune senior writer Jon Fortt live blogging from the keynote at fortune.com/bigtech, video coverage from CNNMoney.com and our post-keynote analysis here on Tuesday afternoon.