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.

Despite fierce competition from machines with more than twice the memory and price points hundreds of dollars lower, Apple’s (AAPL) white 120 GB MacBook has captured the top spot on Amazon’s (AMZN) list of bestselling computers this Christmas eve.

Helped along by rebates ranging from $75 to $150, three Apple-brand notebooks are on the top 10 list this morning. The other bestsellers are the 80 GB MacBook (No. 7) and the 120 GB MacBook Pro (No. 10).

Price cutting among the competition is even steeper. HP’s (HPQ) 250 GB Pavilion (No. 5) is selling for $999.99, 27% off the $1,375 list price.

The least expensive computer on the list, at No. 8, is the $381 Linux-based Asus Galaxy with a 7-inch screen and 4 GB of flash memory rather than a hard drive. Many expect Steve Jobs to announce at Macworld that Apple is entering the market for flash-based notebook computes. Apple’s thin MacBook, however, is likely to be larger, carry more memory, and cost a whole lot more than $381.

In Amazon’s list of top-selling electronics, a late surge by a heavily discounted portable hard drive has pushed an iPod off the stack. Apple had five of the top 10 spots for much of the pre-Christmas shopping period; it’s now down to four. See here.

UPDATE: As of 2 p.m. ET, the MacBook has been edged aside at No. 1 by an HP Pavillion with 160 GB hard drive marked down 37% (including rebate) to $679.99.

BOXING DAY UPDATE: This morning, the day after Christmas, the MacBook is back on top.

Online shopping is up nearly 20% this Christmas, according to comScore Inc. (see here), and electronics is one of the hottest categories, up 24% from last year. So what gadgets are Americans buying this holiday season?

Judging from Amazon’s (AMZN) list of top sellers, a lot of iPods and iPod touches.

With only a couple shopping days left before Christmas, five out of the top 10 items on Amazon’s “bestsellers in electronics” list are Apple (AAPL) products, including the 4 GB iPod Nano (No. 1), the 8 GB nano (No. 4), the iPod touch, (Nos. 6 and 7) and the 80 GB iPod Classic (No. 8).

Apple does even better in the “most gifted in electronics” list, with six out of the top 10.

Also selling well on Amazon are GPS navigators (No. 2, 9 and 10), the Kindle reader (No. 3, on backorder) and a Canon digital camera (No. 5).

In Amazon’s computer department, the MacBook Pro and MacBook come in at No. 4 and 7, respectively, among a lot of HP (HPQ) and Asus machines.

The iPhone is not available on Amazon, but is reported to be selling briskly both here and in Europe. The rumor site 9to5Mac, citing unnamed sources, claims Apple is preparing to announce the sale of the 5 millionth iPhone next month at Macworld. That may be overly optimistic. Even as bullish an analyst as Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster doesn’t expect Apple to have sold more than 3.7 million iPhones by mid January. (See Silicon Alley Insider here.)

SUNDAY UPDATE: Nearly 24 hours after this was first posted — and two days before Christmas — the list of Amazon top sellers in electronics is remarkably stable. The same five Apple products are still in the top 10. The Kindle and the Garmin nuvi 350 navigator have switched places at Nos. 2 and 3. And a Toshiba HD DVD player has moved, like a British Prime Minister, into No. 10.

CHRISTMAS EVE UPDATE: A late surge by a USB 160 GB portable hard drive from Western Digital (sale price: $99, down from $149) has pushed an iPod off Amazon’s top 10 list in electronics. Apple is down to four of the 10 spots. In the computer department, however, the 120 GB MacBook has moved into the No. 1 position, a smaller MacBook has taken No. 7 and a MacBook Pro is No. 10, giving Apple Inc. three out of the top 10 bestselling computers on Amazon this Christmas eve. (See here.)

Jeff Bezos didn’t actually call Amazon’s (AMZN) new Kindle e-book reader the iPod of anything. The phrase was Steve Levy’s, who used it high up in his Newsweek cover story.

“Though Bezos is reluctant to make the comparison,” he wrote, “Amazon believes it has created the iPod of reading.” (link)

Never mind that book reading seems to be a dying art while the appetite for passive entertainment with a soundtrack grows unabated. Or that Apple (AAPL) has sold more than 100 million iPods, while total sales of e-book readers is probably about 100,000, according to today’s Wall Street Journal. Or that Sony (SNE), Philips, Xerox, Gemstar, iRex, and Barnes and Noble have all built e-readers that never quite caught on — at least not well enough to achieve iPod status.

Still, Levy’s phrase became the metaphor — or is it a simile? — that launched a hundred flattering headlines.

• Wall Street Journal: “The iPod of eBook Readers?”
• AppleInsider: “Amazon’s New Kindle Dubbed the iPod of Reading,”
• Gizmodo: “Amazon Kindle Official details: $399, ‘Whispernet’ EV-DO, the ‘iPod of Reading’ “
• Pocket-lint: “Amazon Unveils ‘the iPod of Reading’ “
• Electronista: “Amazon Intros Kindle, the ‘iPod of Reading’”

And so on. A Google News search on “iPod of reading” turned up more than 580 stories this morning, many of them using the phrase, a few attributing it to Bezos.

More broadly, a Google search of “the iPod of” anything turns up more than 760,000 hits. You’ll find the iPod of phones, the iPod of printers, the iPod of cars, the iPod of the brain, the iPod of recovery, the iPod of integration, the iPod of for-pay Internet video, the iPod of the hotel industry, and yes, the iPod of spin.

The iPod, it seems, has become an all-purpose metaphor, short-hand that saves publicists, journalists, bloggers and everybody else the necessity of having to think too hard about what something actually is.

What is Kindle? You can see the specs on Amazon’s product page. But this is a case where watching a video may be more useful than reading about it (dying art, remember?). To see Amazon’s demo, click on the image below.