According to Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty, Apple (AAPL) is the computer maker with the “most upside” as the PC market begins to stabilize after the dismal first quarter of 2009.

There’s some good news for Hewlett Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL) in the report to clients Huberty issued overnight Wednesday, but it’s mostly attributed to enterprise cycles and inventory restocking.

Apple, however, is a different story.

“Even before the new Macbook Pros launched,” she writes, “Apple began to outperform the broader commercial PC segment — with commercial Mac shipments up 25% [month over month] in May versus market growth of just 1%.”

The fact that the new laptops arrived in early June means that they will provide what Huberty calls “a catalyst for growth” in both the June and September fiscal quarters. She points to NPD weekly shipment data (reproduced in the chart at left) showing steady acceleration of Mac shipments over the past few weeks. “Lastly,” she concludes, “suppliers have recently noted Mac unit upside in the quarter.”

Huberty is raising her forecast for Mac sales in the second calendar quarter (Apple’s fiscal Q3) to 2.5 million units, up from 2.4 million. That would represent 12% quarter to quarter growth — less than Apple’s 14% average over the past three years, but a lot better than the 4% QtoQ decline last quarter.

For the fiscal quarter than ended Saturday, she expects Apple to report earnings of $1.16 a share on PC revenue (i.e., not including iPhones, iPods, etc.) of $3.072 billion, up a point or two from her previous estimates.

Huberty has not always been so bullish on the Mac. In fact, one of her reports last September helped trigger the sharpest one-day fall in Apple’s share price in eight years, one that wiped $18 billion off the company’s market cap in the space of 60 minutes. See Why Apple’s shares took a nosedive.

In a sign that should bode well for Apple’s (AAPL) earnings in its third fiscal quarter — which ended Saturday — the MacBook has clawed its way back to the top of Amazon’s (AMZN) bestseller lists.

The Mac, which once led the pack in the online retailer’s Computers & PC Hardware Bestsellers category despite its $1,000 to $2,000 sticker prices, had fallen behind the blistering sales pace set by netbooks like the Asus Eee and the Acer Aspire One, which sell in the $300 to $400 range.

By June 1, the bestselling Apple computer on the list — a white plastic MacBook — had been pushed down to the No. 14 position.

But netbooks have started to fall out favor recently — as witnessed by reports of return rates as high as 30% and an NPD study that found that 60% of consumers who bought them didn’t understand the difference between a netbook and a notebook.

Meanwhile, Apple announced on June 8 that it was refreshing its notebook line and lowering its prices. Result: its computers have become hot sellers on Amazon once again.

Apple’s entry-level 13-inch unibody MacBook, renamed the MacBook Pro, has been one of Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers for 20 days — basically since the moment it went on sale. As of Monday morning, it was the site’s No. 4 bestselling computer overall and No. 1 in the laptop category.

In fact, three of the top 10 and five of the top 20 bestselling laptops on Amazon are now MacBooks.

Apple is not the only beneficiary of what some see as growing consumer disillusion with netbooks. HP (HPQ) Pavilions, Toshiba Satellites and Samsung Mini Notebooks are also selling briskly online.

See also:

• AMEX vs. Amazon; Macs vs. netbooks
• Amazon’s Christmas bestsellers: Acer, Apple and Asus

There’s a surprising level of awe and wonder in the tech press about the batteries in the MacBook Pro computers that Apple (AAPL) unveiled last week — especially since they’ve been around for more than a year.

“Battery life to die for,” was the headline of a widely quoted review in AnandTech.

“Battery technology simply doesn’t advance this fast,” wrote Computerworld’s Seth Weintraub.

“This kind of battery life is reserved for iPods and mobile phones, not laptops,” gushed Leander Kahney in Wired’s Cult of Mac. “Who cares if the battery is sealed in?”

That last remark is especially surprising given that one of the knocks against the first Apple computer to deploy the new battery technology — the MacBook Air that Steve Jobs introduced in January 2008 — was that its battery couldn’t be replaced with a fresh one if it ran out of juice in mid-flight over the Atlantic.

But the first MacBook Air only promised 5 hours of computer power. Apple claims the new MacBooks will deliver 7 or 8 hours on a single charge and last up to 5 years — longer than the expected life of the average laptop.

AnandTech tested the first claim in a series of benchmarks reproduced below the fold. Bottom line: the new MacBook Pro delivered …

• 8.13 hours of light wireless Web browsing, and
• 4.92 hours of heavy downloading.

According to Anand Lal Shimpi, who ran the tests, he saw 50% to 100% improvement in battery life over the old MacBook Pros — considerably better than the 46% theoretical improvement he expected based on the new battery’s capacity.

His review offers several explanations for the improvement:

• new battery technology (lithium polymer vs. lithium ion)
• new form factor (rectangles vs. cylinders)
• better battery management (adaptive charging that senses the power needs of each cell).

Whether Apple can deliver on its promise of five years of battery life (based on 1,000 recharges vs. 300) remains to be seen. If the battery does need replacing before the computer dies of natural causes, Apple technicians will do the job (and dispose of the old one) for $120 a pop.

You’ll might be able to get an independent technician to do it for less, but probably not without voiding your warranty.

Below the fold: AnandTech’s benchmarks. To view an Apple promotional video about the new batteries, click here.

Battery graphics courtesy of Apple Inc.

For those who couldn’t make it to San Francisco Monday — or who couldn’t get into the event (it sold out in record time) — Apple (AAPL) has posted a 2-hour streaming video of the entire keynote. Click here to watch it.

If you want to learn more about the iPhone 3G S without watching the video, the same link offers a 13-minute guided tour that can be played on a computer or an iPod. It also offers links to videos about Snow Leopard and the new MacBook Pros.

See also:

• Live from Apple WWDC 2009: New iPhone, new MacBooks, no Steve Jobs
• Analyst: The $99 iPhone will increase sales twofold

Blame Duncan Riley.

Last Wednesday, he posted an “exclusive”  on his blog — The Inquisitr — under the headline: “Apple to launch $800 laptop.” Although his scoop was unsourced, the news that Apple was set to announce its cheapest notebook computer ever was picked up by Apple blogs and mainstream publications around the world — including the New York Times. Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi even published a spreadsheet calculating how much an $800 laptop would increase Apple’s available market.

So when Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s new line of laptops on Tuesday with starting prices of $1,299 for the MacBook, $1,799 for the MacBook Air and $1,999 for the MacBook Pro, you could almost hear the sound of Apple’s (AAPL) shares falling.

What this means is that Apple is not — with one exception — lowering prices in order to grow its market share. In fact, it raised the base price of the MacBook $200. Steve Jobs is clearly sticking with the strategy that has worked for the company since he came back to Apple in 1997: building high-end, high-margin computers and selling them at a premium to discriminating users.

The one exception is the original white MacBook — the best-selling MacBook ever, according to Jobs — which sold for $1,099 when it was introduced two years ago and will now sell for $999.

What you don’t get with the white MacBook, however, are the new features introduced on the redesigned MacBook and MacBook Pro:

• Unibody aluminum frames (aka “the Brick“)
• LED-backlit glossy displays
• New graphics chipsets offering a 3X-to-6X performance boost
• Button-less multi-touch glass trackpads
• Longer (5 hour) battery life

Except for the pricing, almost none of this was a surprise, given that the specs had been largely nosed out by rumor websites days — if not weeks — in advance. Even the pricing — and the fact that the $800 rumor was wrong — had been leaked a few hours before the event, perhaps to lower expectations on the Street.

If so, it was in vain. Apple’s share price, which had gained a record-breaking 13% on Monday and opened higher Tuesday morning, was down more than 5% by the time Jobs finished his presentation and gone to the Q&A. (In fairness, so were most of the other tech stocks.)

“Apple is very good at pricing,” says Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for The NPD Group, who believes Apple was right to hold the prices of the new MacBooks steady. “They haven’t run out of headroom yet. I expect they will eventually find a way to build out a line that will come in at $799, but they’ll do it in their own way and at their own pace.”

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster points out that it’s unlike Apple to continue sales of an older model at a reduced price, but considers the move “prudent” given investor sentiment about companies that target high-end consumers, as Apple does.

“We believe the company is positioning its Mac lineup for an extended macroeconomic slowdown,” Munster wrote in a report to clients issued after the Apple event. He added, however, that having seen the machines first hand, he thinks the improvements are significant enough to drive buyers up to the $1,299 price-point. “Of the MacBook buyers who would have considered the $1,099 version, we believe more than half will opt for the more expensive $1,299 version instead of the $999 option.”

See here for my colleague Jon Fortt’s live blog of the event.

UPDATE: Apple has made Tuesday’s presentation available as a QuickTime movie. Click here to watch it.

[Photo courtesy of Engadget.]

With only hours to go before Apple (AAPL) unveils its new lineup of MacBooks, the rumor sites have been working overtime, trying to make sense of blurry spy photos and purloined price lists.

But on Tuesday morning, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber — a blogger with particularly good sources in Cupertino — cut through the fog and offered some clarity.

According to Gruber’s remarkably detailed report:

• The photo here of a MacBook Pro, which surfaced Monday night at Engadget, is the real deal. It shows a black keyboard encased in a single-piece, latch-free aluminum frame.
• There is no $800 or $899 MacBook, as widely rumored. The only Apple notebook computer that will retail for less than $1,000 is the old white 2.1 GHz MacBook, which is getting a price cut from $1,099 to $999.
• The new MacBook Pros come at two price points: $1,999 (2.4 GHz) and $2,499 (2.53 GHz)
• The new MacBooks look like 13-inch versions of the MacBook Pro and come in two configurations: $1,299 (2.0 GHz, 2 GB memory, 160 GB disk) and $1,499 (2.4 GHz, 2 GB memory, 250 GB disk)
• The new machines have no separate trackpad button. The glass trackpad is itself a button. “You just press and it clicks,” writes Gruber. “Sounds odd, but I hear it’s very cool in practice.”
• The new machines are powered by Intel CPUs, but replace the Intel graphics chipsets with a new NVIDIA 9400M GPU (and, in the case of the MacBook Pro, a second NVIDIA 9600M GT). These chipsets can be used to drive an external monitor, including a new $899 24-inch Apple LED display that will also be introduced Tuesday.
• The MacBook Air remains largely unchanged, but with larger hard drives: a 120 GB disk in the low-end model, and a 128 GB solid-state drive in the high-end model.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” warns Gruber, “for jackassery in post-event news coverage, much of which, I predict, will focus on the fact that none of these new machines sell for under $1299. The reality is that these new machines are all steps up, but the rumors that caught the most attention in the past week were the ones regarding $799 and $899 laptops. None of these “$800 new MacBook!” rumors came from anyone with any credibility, but that won’t stop some people from holding it against Apple that they didn’t pan out.”

You can read Gruber’s full report here. He offers no explanation for where he got his information, but given the tenor of his final comments we wouldn’t be surprised if the specs were deliberately leaked to lower expectations that had gotten wildly out of control.

Apple is scheduled to unveil the new MacBook lineup at a special event on its Cupertino campus at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT).

In a report to clients Thursday, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster added some meat to the bare-bones invitation Apple sent out a couple hours earlier. (See here and here.)

The most important news, according to Munster, is that Apple for the first time since it discontinued the iBook will be offering its premium notebook computers below the psychologically-important $1,000 barrier. Specifically:

• Higher quality, lower-priced MacBooks. Munster expects the new MacBooks, which currently sell for $1,099 and come in black or white, to be clad in a new aluminum casing with a gesture-based touchpad and to sell for $899 to $999. “In other words, we expect the new MacBooks to be a meaningful upgrade with an [average sales price] 9% to 18% lower.”
• New MacBook Pros. Munster also expects Apple to introduce redesigned MacBook Pros at the same or slightly lower price. The current MacBook Pro design was introduced almost 3 years ago at $1,999. The new machines, he writes, will likely be thinner and include a more-sophisticated, gesture-based trackpad. He estimates they will start at $1,899.
• New MacBook Airs. Munster expects Apple to introduce new MacBook Airs with updated specs, but doesn’t offer any further detail.
• No Tablet Mac. “While we are confident that Apple will eventually bring its touchscreen technology from the iPhone to the Mac,” he writes, “we do not expect to see a touchscreen Mac this year.”

Piper Jaffray is sticking with its target price of $250 a share. In midday trading Thursday, Apple (AAPL) was up 3% to just over $92.

With this year’s iPhone and iPod updates behind them, Apple watchers have shifted their attention to the products that matter most to the company’s bottom line: the MacBook and the increasingly long-in-the-tooth MacBook Pro.

Steve Jobs likes to refer to the Mac as one of the three legs of Apple’s stool (the iPod and iPhone being the other two). But that makes for a pretty tippy stool; Macs represent more than 48% of Apple’s quarterly revenue these days and MacBooks account for 62% of that.

Sales of Apple’s laptops have been on fire lately (no overheating pun intended). On Wednesday, NPD reported that Apple’s (AAPL) share of the North American notebook market grew from 6.6% to 10.6% over the past year — a 60% increase that easily outpaced market leaders Dell (DELL; up 1.4%), HP (HPQ; up 0.9%) and Acer (down 22.6%). And although Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster predicts that when Apple reports its fourth quarter earnings in October, Mac sales will have grown only 30% year over year — down from 55% in Q3 — that’s still something like 2.9 million machines sold in three months at Apple’s fat profit margins.

Which makes it all the more surprising that Apple has waited so long to spruce up its notebook line — the laptop-scorching MacBook Pro, in particular. As Seth Weintraub points out at Computerworld.com, the look and feel of the MacBook Pro is essentially unchanged from the titanium Powerbook that Steve Jobs introduced at Macworld 2003 — a couple of lifetimes ago in computer terms.

Well that’s all supposed to change on Oct. 14, when the long-awaited revamped notebooks are due to be introduced, according to sources said to be familiar with Apple’s plans. What will they look like? To jump start the conversation, Weintraub on Wednesday posted his wish-list of features, among them:

• An one-piece aluminum frame with a rounder, skinnier shape (a la MacBook Air)
• A high-res 16-inch LED backlit screen
• Built-in 3G wireless technology, perhaps even WMAX
• A multi-touch glass trackpad
• HD video out
• Built-in GPS (for what purpose is not clear)
• Blu-Ray disk drive (this he’s not so sure about, since it might cut into iTunes Store sales)
• Solid-state disk drive optional
• HD camera
• All at the current price points ($1099 for the MacBook, $1999 for the MacBook Pro) (link)

That’s almost certainly too much to ask for, but a guy can dream, can’t he?

Images purporting to be photos of the new machines have already started to appear on the Web. The one at right showed up earlier this week on a German T-Mobile website, but the consensus seems to be that it’s a fake. If history is any guide, however, we should be seeing fuzzy spy shots of the real thing any day now.

The biggest mystery to come out of Apple’s Q3 earnings conference call Monday — besides the state of Steve Jobs’ health — was the “future product transition” that CFO Peter Oppenheimer mentioned as one of the three reasons he expects the company’s gross margins to fall from 34.1% to 31.5% over the next three months.

For a company that doesn’t talk about future products, Apple spent a lot of time Monday talking about this one. Oppenheimer mentioned this product transition at least four times during the call, hinting at “state-of-the-art products at pricepoints our competitors can’t match” and adding coyly — and illogically — that he couldn’t talk about it.

So, of course, that set off a round of overnight speculation. See, for example, here.

Could it be a revamped Apple TV? No, that’s a product that sells in numbers too small to account for the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to do that kind of damage to Apple’s gross margins.

Could it be the long-awaited tablet Mac? No, that would be a new product, not a product transition.

Could it be a revamped iPod line, with iPod touch-like controls and solid state drives to replace the old hard drives? That’s more likely. After all, Oppenheimer warned of the same kind of product transition costs at this time last year, and what came out of it was the iPod touch.

Could it have something to do with the MacBook line? That’s what Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster suggested in a note to clients Tuesday morning. Overhauls of the MacBook and MacBook Pro are overdue, he pointed out, and delivering them just before school starts — perhaps at prices starting at $999 — would make a lot of sense.

On the other hand, Apple (AAPL) is a company that thrives on dropping hints and then clamming up, letting fevered speculation do the work of softening up the market.

Maybe that’s what Peter Oppenheimer — taking a lesson from his CEO — was really up to.

The World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) that opens Monday morning in San Francisco would be a relatively obscure technical gathering of programmers and IT administrators – with sessions on “Advances in OpenGL” and “What’s New in Objective-C” – were it not for one thing.

Steve Jobs.

The keynote address that Apple’s CEO is scheduled to give starting at 10 am Pacific Time (1 pm ET) is perhaps the second most closely watched event in high tech – after the opening speech Jobs gives every January at Macworld.

In the audience at Moscone West’s main hall will be – in addition to thousands of developers (WWDC sold out for the first time this year) – hundreds of reporters, photographers, TV crews, venture capitalists, CEOs and maybe even a few celebrities from Hollywood and the music world.

What’s Jobs going to talk about? To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns and known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we think we know he’s going to say, and things we know we don’t know. Here’s a rundown:

3G iPhone. Except for a few short sellers on Wall Street, everybody who follows Apple assumes that Jobs will introduce a new iPhone that can send and receive data at so-called third-generation speeds. (In fact, so widespread is this belief that if Jobs doesn’t show up with the thing on Monday, Apple’s (AAPL) shares will get hammered before he leaves the stage.) Almost everything else about iPhone 2.0 are matters of little hard information and intense speculation. Is it thicker or thinner than version 1.0? Will it have a built-in GPS chip so it always knows where it’s at? Will its price be subsidized by AT&T and the overseas carriers? Will it go on sale next week or sometime later? If these questions weren’t still in play, there would be almost nothing to talk about next week.

The SDK. We know Jobs is going to spend some time discussing the so-called software development kit for the iPhone. We know because that’s one of the two main themes of the conference (symbolized by the bizarre image of two Golden Gate Bridges that decorated the e-mail invitation). The other theme is the Macintosh operating system; presumably the two are merging somewhere in Marin County, judging by the doctored photograph. The SDK will finally give third party developers access to the platform Apple has managed to build, as Jupiter Research’s Michael Gartenberg notes, without them. There’s a flood of new software for the iPhone and iPod touch ready for release soon as Apple gives the word – including programs that will allow IT departments, should they be so inclined, to integrate the iPhone into their enterprises the way Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry is today.

.Mac. Even Jobs agrees that Apple’s $99-a-year suite of Internet services (Mail, Backup, iSync, iDisk, etc.) needs an overhaul, if only to match the online applications that Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) now offer for free. By tracking crumbs of information scattered in recent Apple software releases, some observers believe Jobs is set to replace .Mac with something called Mobile Me, or just plain .Me. Probably the single most effective thing Apple could do improve .Mac would be to emulate Google and give it away.

Another iPhone. Speculation that Jobs would introduce a so-called iPhone nano – a smaller iPhone at a more affordable price – has faded; the smart money has pushed this back to next January. However, as American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu points out, there are good reasons to suspect that Apple will keep the first generation iPhone around, if only to have something to sell in those parts of Latin America – and parts of North America, for that matter – where where 3G coverage is spotty or nonexistent.

New MacBooks. Two weeks ago, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster put the odds of Apple introducing redesigned Mac portables next week at 60%. The other odds he gave – 80% by the end of summer – now seem more like it.

New Touchscreen device. Wu in report to clients this week said he’s learned that work on larger, 4-inch and 7-inch multitouch devices has “gone beyond the prototype stage” at Apple. He goes out on a limb and gives 50-50 odds that one will be introduced at WWDC next week.

Those are the key themes, but there’s plenty more to speculate about. If you want to dig deeper – in a suitably interactive way – come to WWDC with a copy of the 2008 edition of John Siracusa’s Keynote Bingo card, pasted below the fold. The rules are laid out in detail at Ars Technica here, but they’re pretty straightforward: put a token over a square if Jobs mentions the topic or says the word or introduces the speaker during the keynote. Cover five squares in an a row, and you get to stand up and shout Bingo!

Nobody’s won the game yet. This could be the year.

[Moscone West photo courtesy of MacNN.]