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:

In an embarrassment of plaudits, Apple (AAPL) swept all three laptop categories in Consumer Reports‘ latest study of personal computers. The reader survey, published Monday, is the cover story of the magazine’s June issue.

In all, five Apple notebooks made the cut. In one category –13-inch notebooks — Apple won the top three places.

In that category, the 13-inch aluminum MacBook was No. 1, the solid-state MacBook Air No. 2, and the white plastic 13-inch MacBook No. 3.

The 15-inch MacBook came in first in the 14- to 16-inch notebook category.

And the 17- to 18-inch notebook category was taken by the 17-inch MacBook. The 17-inch HP (HPQ) Pavilion made famous by Lauren De Long in the first Microsoft’s (MSFT) Laptop Hunter ad, came in fourth in this category behind Dell (DELL) and Lenovo machines.

Apple also took first place in tech support. Its desktop machines did not fare quite as well. The 20-inch iMac came in second after the Dell XPS One 24 in the standard desktop category. The Mac Mini also made this list.

Below: Consumer Reports’ laptop rankings. (Click to enlarge.)

Reflecting a strong 2008 in which its sales — if not its stock price — jumped sharply, Apple (AAPL) this week made its first appearance in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 since Steve Jobs’ return.

Apple became a Fortune 500 company in 1983, but it fell off Fortune magazine’s list of America’s 500 largest companies (ranked by revenue) in 1995, while Jobs was running NeXT.

Apple climbed back onto the list in 2005, eight years after Jobs’ return. It vaulted an impressive 32 spots this year to land at No. 71, thanks in part to the declining fortunes of some of the firms that were above it, but mostly to revenues that grew 35.3% to $32.479 billion in 2008.

Other companies made larger leaps — URS Corp. (URS) had the biggest, jumping 185 spots to No. 264 — but they were all considerably smaller than Apple. None landed in the Fortune 100.

The Fortune 500 issue is dated May 4 but was released this week online. The big news this year is that Exxon Mobil (XOM) displaced Wal-Mart (WMT) at the No. 1 spot.

Among Apple’s largest U.S. competitors, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) came in at No. 9, Dell (DELL) at No. 33 and Microsoft (MSFT) at No. 35.

See this year’s Fortune 500 here.

Below the fold: Apple’s ranking through the years.

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.

On Wednesday, Gartner Research reported that Apple’s (AAPL) share of the U.S. computer market, which topped 9% in calendar Q3 last year, dropped to 7.4% in Q1 2009 — putting it in fourth place behind HP (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Acer.

The next day, Apple’s share price rose nearly 2% to finish Thursday at $121.45, its highest close in six months.

Why the disconnect? Chalk it up to the ASPs.

As Gartner’s Mikako Kitagawa notes, sales for Apple’s competitors are being driven by the explosion of interest in low-cost netbooks — not just among penny-pinching consumers, but in the professional and education markets as well.

As result, Gartner estimates that average selling prices (ASPs) for computers sold in the first quarter may have fallen as much as 20% across the board — cutting sharply into PC makers’ revenues.

Except at Apple. Despite rumors that its engineers may be working on some kind of device with a 10-inch screen, the company has so far shown zero interest in duking it out with the likes of Acer and Asus in the bargain basement mini-notebook market.

So even as Apple’s market share shrinks, its margins and gross revenue are likely to have held up better than any of its competitors.

Moreover, while Gartner’s Ms. Kitagawa is seeing signs of channel inventory restocking at other companies — evidence that the global PC market has not yet hit bottom — she singles out Apple’s “deft control of inventories [which] limited its shipment decline.”

All this — and a flood of deferred iPhone earnings — may help explain why analysts are scrambling to raise their Apple price targets (and talking up the stock) in advance of the company’s fiscal Q2 earnings report next Wednesday, April 22.

Below the fold: Gartner’s preliminary estimates of domestic PC shipments for Q1 2009.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal’s Taipei bureau weighed in on this rumor Monday evening, adding screen dimensions that were missing from the original report. See below.

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The Chinese-language Commercial Times reported Monday that Wintek, a Taiwanese maker of LCD displays, will supply touchscreen panels for a mysterious new Apple (AAPL) product, with shipments to begin the second half of the year.

What that product might be is not clear — even Wintek says it doesn’t know. But according to DigiTimes, the Taipei-based daily that carried the report in English, Commercial Times claims Apple is building “netbooks” for release later this year and that Quanta Computer, one of Apple’s favorite suppliers, will be assembling them.

That’s a claim that should be treated with some skepticism.

First of all, as MacRumors points out, the track record of Commercial Times when it comes to predicting Apple’s products based on supply chain reports is mixed at best.

Second, the netbook market is one that Apple has managed to avoid — at least for now — to the benefit of its bottom line.

Netbooks, for anyone who hasn’t been tracking recent computer sales trends, are low-cost sub-notebook sized computers designed for e-mailing, Web browsing and remote access to Web-based applications. They’ve been selling like crazy lately, driving down the average selling price of companies like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL) while shrinking already slender profit margins. (See Apple so far immune to PC price “collapse.”)

The question of when Apple is going to move into this market has come up at every quarterly analyst call since last fall.

“We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk,” Steve Jobs said last October, when asked if users were going to see cheaper computers from Apple. “Our DNA will not let us ship that.”

Asked directly about the netbook market, he was dismissive. “We’ll wait and see how that nascent category evolves, and we have got some pretty interesting ideas if it does evolve,” he said. Besides, he added, Apple already has a product that fits the bill.

“You know, one of our entrants into that category if you will is the iPhone, for browsing the Internet, and doing email and all the other things that a netbook lets you do. … An iPhone is a pretty good solution for that, and it fits in your pocket.”

Asked again in January about how Apple plans to respond to the market for netbooks, now that it’s taking off, acting CEO Tim Cook echoed Jobs’ remarks. Netbooks, he said, are “principally based on hardware that’s much less powerful than we think customers want, software technology that is not good, cramped keyboards, small displays.”

“We don’t think people will be pleased with those products,” Cook added. “It’s a category we watch, we’ve got some ideas here, but right now we think the products are inferior and will not provide an experience to customers they’re happy with.”

So what is Wintek making for Apple, if not touchscreens for a netbook?

Since the dimensions of those screens were not provided, it could be almost anything, from a high-end iPhone to an oversized iPod touch to a  Newton-type tablet computer.

It could even be a netbook. But if it is, we suspect it won’t be a piece of junk. And we’re pretty sure it won’t sell for less than $500.

UPDATE: Late Monday, the Dow Jones Newswire added fuel to the Apple netbook rumor with fresh details provided by two-unnamed sources:

“The mini laptop computers will likely have monitor screens that are between 9.7-inches and 10-inches, one person, who declined to be named, said.

“Another person said other specifications and functions are still under evaluation.” (link)

[Image of an imaginary Apple touchscreen netbook courtesy of Gizmodo.]

Apple (AAPL) is the exception to what one analyst describes as a “permanent and structural” collapse of PC pricing and revenue triggered by the onset of the recession and the rise of low-cost netbooks.

In the chart reproduced at right (click to enlarge), TBR analyst Ezra Gottheil documents a 13% drop in average selling price (ASP) and an 18% decline in PC revenues in the fourth quarter of calendar 2008.

“ASPs have been declining over the long term,” Gottheil writes in a report to clients released Thursday, “but the fall-off became steeper in 2008 and the bottom dropped out in 4Q08.”

The silver lining for Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Lenovo, writes Gottheil, is that customers didn’t stop buying computers. “In a dramatic and frightening economic crisis,” he writes, “unit volume was down only 5%. TBR believes this demonstrates the price‑elasticity of the PC market.”

Apple’s unit sales actually rose in the December quarter, although the rate of growth, 9% year-to-year, was considerably below the 44% recorded one year earlier. But unlike its competitors selling Windows PCs and netbooks, Apple’s average selling price has held remarkably steady, as you can see in an exclusive TBR chart — not included in Gottheil’s report — that breaks out ASP’s by manufacturer. We pasted it below:

“Apple’s a special case in that not only are its ASPs much higher than the others,” Gottheil explains, “but also they have been amazingly flat over the eight years of data that I have, while the others have showed a steady erosion. The differences have only gotten wider over the years.”

Apple’s ASPs did drop, however — 8.1% year-to-year, from $1,532 in 4Q07 to $1,408 in 4Q08. Gottheil attributes this decline to a change in product mix.

“When Apple introduced the new MacBook in October, it drove down ASPs in two ways: it introduced a new price entry point with the MacBook White, but more important, we think, was making the $1,299 MacBook so attractive that it shifted the mix between MacBooks and MacBook Pros.”

Gottheil is one of those analysts who believes Apple will eventually produce a netbook, despite Steve Jobs’ and Tim Cook’s disavowals. (For a well-reasoned contrary view, see here.)

And there is no question in his mind that if Mac sales drop far enough, Apple will eventually adjust its price points, one way or another.

“They can profitably produce Macs at lower prices,” he says. “Still high quality, just not as much horsepower.”

Microsoft’s (MSFT) new version of Windows is probably still a couple quarters away from official release, but Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu is already trying to measure its negative impact on Apple (AAPL).

“With the potential release of Windows 7 in either 3Q or 4Q of this year,” he writes in a report to clients issued Thursday morning, “we believe we could finally have a Windows operating system worth upgrading to.”

It may be hard for Mac users to appreciate how much this matters to IT managers.  In the Mac world, an upgrade from say, Tiger to Leopard, is relatively painless as long as your computer has the horsepower to handle the new system.

Not so in the world of Windows. As Wu writes: “From a cost-benefit analysis, it has proven time and time again that it is cheaper for consumers and enterprises to purchase new hardware with the new operating system as opposed to buying the new OS and running on old hardware.”

That’s why Vista’s tepid reception was such bad news for PC makers. Most IT departments stuck with Windows XP, skipped a generation of PC hardware, and are now managing networks of computers that are three to five years old.

“We believe Windows 7 may finally help spur an upgrade cycle,” writes Wu.

The major beneficiary of this, he says, will be Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the world’s largest player in the PC market with broad geographical coverage. (HP is not a pure play, he notes; PCs now represent only 30% of its business.)

Dell (DELL) is a purer play. It also benefits if Windows 7 takes off as expected, and Wu estimates that some 80% of its business is PC related.

Which brings us to the largest U.S. manufacturer of non-Windows computers.

“For Apple,” Wu writes, “we believe there is potential headline risk more than anything,” by which he means that the stock could suffer more from negative press than from any actual technological disadvantage. He notes that Intel Macs can run Windows, citing evidence that many switchers are doing just that. Moreover, he adds, Apple has an ace up its sleeve:

“We believe AAPL will respond with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, its next-generation operating system with even better usability, 64-bit processing, better Intel (INTC) optimization, and better utilization of GPUs (graphics processing units), keeping it a step or two ahead of Windows 7.”

Wu is sticking with “buy” recommendations for Apple and HP and a “hold” for Dell.

See also: Windows 7: Trouble on the upgrade path

In reviewing Apple’s (AAPL) new desktops Tuesday, some analysts chided the company for not setting “more aggressive price points,” as Kaufman Bros.’s Shaw Wu put it, given today’s “tough macroeconomic environment.”

But not Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner. He did a spec-by-spec comparisons with comparable Dell (DEL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) machines. His surprising conclusion, given Apple’s reputation for premium pricing: he found the new iMacs to be “a better value than competing Windows-based products.” Specifically…

“A side-by-side comparison suggests the new iMacs match up favorably against Dell  and HP’s All-in-One’s on a price-to-performance basis. For example, the $1,499 model has a faster CPU and RAM with better or comparable graphics, and is still $100-$250 cheaper (though it lacks a TV Tuner, ~$60-$100 upgrade).”

To get a feel for what he’s seeing, I’ve pasted one of his charts below:

See also: Marketing by spy shot: New Macs (with specs)

In a survey that found planned spending on consumer electronics at its lowest level since 2002, things are looking marginally better for Apple’s laptop computers.

The ChangeWave Alliance survey — conducted among 3,115 consumers between Feb. 2 and Feb. 9 — found that of those who expected to buy a computer in the next 90 days, the percentage who planned to buy an Apple laptop was up 2 points, to 30%.

This follows a January survey that recorded the second sharpest dip in planned Mac purchases since ChangeWave starting tracking Apple’s computers. The sharpest dip, reported last September, sparked a massive sell-off in Apple (AAPL) shares. See The survey that squashed Apple, Part 1 and Part 2.

ChangeWave research director Paul Carton notes that the January fall-off in Mac purchases predicted by his survey showed up, right on schedule, in the NPD data released one month later. See Report: Mac sales off 6% in January; iPod off 14%.

Meanwhile, things are not looking so good for the increasingly long-in-the-tooth iMac and Mac Pro lines. Planned purchases of Apple desktop computers, which had held steady in the January survey, fell a point in February, to 26%. A refresh of the iMac line, widely anticipated at January’s Macworld Expo and now expected sometime this quarter, could turn that around.

“I expect we’ll see Apple muddling through,” Carton told reporters in a conference call Wednesday afternoon. But he added that while Apple’s share of the pie may be growing slightly, the pie itself — that is, the percentage of consumers planning to buy any computer — has shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded in a ChangeWave survey: 6% for laptops and 4% for desktops. (In June, 2007, those numbers were 12% and 7%, respectively.)

Apple is holding up better than say, Dell (DELL), Carton suggests, because its customers continue to express satisfaction with their purchases, as indicated by the chart at right. More than 80% of Apple customers declared themselves to be “very satisfied” with their new computers.  Most of the manufacturers of comparably-priced PCs found themselves in the 50% to 55% range.

As for the broader economy, a slight bump in planned consumer spending recorded in ChangeWave’s January survey was completely wiped out in its most recent polling. Better than three-in-five U.S. respondents (61%) said they expect to spend less money over the next 90 days, a 4 point decline in one month. See the chart below:

When the red (spend less) and blue (spend more) lines crossed in January 2008, Carton declared that the U.S. economy was headed into a recession — a call that turned out to be right on the money.

From the ChangeWave Alliance Web site:

ChangeWave runs a proprietary research network of 20,000 highly qualified business, technology, and medical professionals — as well as early adopter consumers — who spend their everyday lives on the frontline of technological change. (link)