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

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster has worked his magic on the raw market share data released Monday by the NPD Group, and he sees a silver lining in a lot of negative numbers.

The NPD data relevant to Apple’s (AAPL) product lines show:

• Mac units down 3% year-to-year and their average selling price (ASP) flat.
• iPod units down 18% year-to-year and ASP down 7.5%.

From this Munster finds:

• A “positive” for Apple shares in the Mac numbers. He was expecting NPD to report units down 2% to 5% in May, but he expects them to pick up in June following last week’s price cuts. The Street is expecting Mac sales to end the quarter down 8% for the year and Munster was expecting them to be down 4% to 12%. NPD’s new data, and the appeal of the new MacBooks, leads him to think Apple could beat those expectations.
• The iPod numbers, Munster writes, are “in-line” with expectations, although he had estimated that they would be down 5% to 10% and in fact they were much worse — down 18% for May. Average selling price was worse too, down 7.5% versus his estimate of 7%. But Munster estimates that by the end of quarter, Apple will have shipped 9.5 million to 10.5 million iPods, in line with the Street’s estimate of about 10 million. Moreover, he is expecting iPod shipments to accelerate in June, tied to the free iPods Apple is giving students who buy the new, lower-priced MacBooks. He also expects ASPs to grow a bit — to 7% — by the end of June thanks to the new, higher-priced iPod shuffles that began shipping in mid-March.

Munster is sticking with his buy rating for Apple with a target price of $180 a share.

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.

The price cuts Apple (AAPL) announced Monday on the MacBook and iPhone lines are “significant” and surprisingly aggressive, writes Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster in a note to clients issued after the WWDC keynote was over.

Historically, he writes, a 50% cut in iPhone pricing has increased demand twofold.

He’s referring to the last year’s cut to $199 from $399. That price reduction was actually accompanied by a tripling of global unit sales (from 4.7 million to 15 million), but some of those sales were in overseas markets. U.S. sales in that period, he estimates, increased twofold.

The MacBook price cuts were more modest — between 5% and 15% — but make Munster “increasingly confident” in his near-term Mac estimates (2.2 million Macs in the third fiscal quarter; 2.4 million in fourth quarter, which ends in September).

The pricing on OS X Snow Leopard was even more aggressive; it’s scheduled to ship in September for $29 (for current Leopard users), as opposed to the typical $129 operating system upgrade.

Munster says he’s not worried about the impact on Apple’s bottom line, however. He notes that when Leopard shipped in 2007, the Mac user base was about 23 million. Today Apple announced that its user base has grown to 75 million active OS X users.

Munster, having predicted that Jobs would return to Apple by the end of June and not before, claims he is not surprised that the CEO was a no-show Monday.

Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference runs until Friday.

See also:

• Live from Apple WWDC 2009: New iPhone, new MacBooks, no Steve Jobs

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.)

A report last week that Apple (AAPL) is preparing to slash prices on its entry level MacBook and iMac models has triggered a flurry of speculation about what the new price points might be.

According to AppleInsider’s Kasper Jade, Apple sees the cuts — which could come in the next month or two — as an “interim solution” to the growing popularity of netbooks, those sub-compact laptops that Steve Jobs once dismissed as “a piece of junk” but which are flying off the shelves at $299 to $349 apiece.

For example Acer, whose Aspire One netbooks are Amazon’s bestsellers, saw its U.S. market share grow 49.4% (to 13.6%) in the first quarter of 2009, according to Gartner Research, even as Apple’s share shrank to 7.4%, down 1% year to year. Mac sales actually fell last quarter for the first time in nearly six years.

How low will Apple go to turn that around? Jade’s reporting — based on unnamed sources “familiar with the matter” — is fuzzy on that point, but in the comment stream he makes it clear that he’s talking about price reductions in the range of $100 to $150.

Applying these cuts to the current entry-level machines, we get:

• White 13-inch MacBook: $849 – $899, reduced from $999
• 20-inch 2.66 GHz aluminum iMac: $969 – $1,019, reduced from $1,119

With gross margins last quarter of 36.4% — up from 34.7% in Q1 — Apple can certainly afford to sacrifice some profit to grow share. As AppleInsider points out, Apple last month started selling 2GHz iMacs to the education market for $899.

The real questions is, will it work? Will consumers who are buying $349 Acers — or like Microsoft’s (MSFT) Lauren, $699 HP (HPQ) Pavilions — give the MacBook a second look if it’s priced at $849?

Would you?

Bolstered by renewed optimism about the U.S. economy, consumers this spring are putting money aside to buy netbooks and Mac laptops, according to a report released Thursday by ChangeWave Research.

The ChangeWave survey of 3,231 high-end consumers was taken in April and showed a 2 point jump in plans to buy a laptop in the next three months — the first uptick in this number recorded by ChangeWave in 17 months.

Nearly of quarter — 23% — of those who planned to buy a laptop said they had their eye on a netbook.  That’s mostly good news for HP (HPQ), Asus and Acer — companies that sell loads bare-bones laptops in the $400 to $600 price range.

But when asked whose computer they planned to buy, a surprisingly high 29% specified Apple (AAPL) — a purveyor of high-end laptops — down a point from a February survey, but up a point from January.

“The economy is finally starting to move in Apple’s direction,” said ChangeWave research director Paul Carton in a conference call to discuss the results.

Joining him was RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky, who reversed his position on Apple last week and raised his price target dramatically, from $95 a share to $165.

“This tide will help lift Mac’s growth,” said Abramsky. “The Mac franchise is not dead — in fact, it’s likely to rebound.”

The challenge for Apple, he says, will be to address the shift toward the low end of the market, either by introducing new products or cutting prices, while preserving its “premium proposition” — the perception among Apple loyalists that while you pay more for a Mac, you get what you pay for.

Addressing the smartphone market, where Apple’s share among ChangeWave members continues to grow, Abramsky predicts that Apple will introduce a “pro” version of the iPhone at its World Wide Developers Conference in June as well as a price cut on the current model.

Apple will not introduce a “nano” iPhone this year, he said, despite reports that a low-end phone was coming. But he added that “next year we know that’s in the pipeline” mostly for pre-pay markets (low-cost or free) in Asia, Eastern Europe and Russia.

As for that $95-a-share target — and a $70 target that preceded it in January — he admits that it was a mistake. “We were wrong in that valuation call,” he says.

He explained that he was worried in January about three things: slowing Mac sales, shrinking margins and Steve Jobs’ health.

Mac sales did slow, but margins held up, and he’s less worried about Steve Jobs today given “concrete signs” that Apple’s CEO remains involved in planning future products.

Apple closed at $125.8 a share Thursday, up more than half a percentage point for the day.

Below the fold: a ChangeWave chart of consumer purchase plans for Macs going back to 2006 and a second chart comparing those numbers with actual Mac sales (as reported by Apple) to show how closely they track.

See also:

• In dismal economy, MacBook outlook slightly brighter
• Mike Abramsky’s bad Apple advice

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)

Adding to the growing buzz — some of which he helped create – around a possible refresh of Apple’s (AAPL) iMac line of desktop computers, Kaufman Bros.’ Shaw Wu issued a report to clients Monday morning with the latest update from his supply chain sources.

Noting that AppleInsider reported Friday that Apple seems to be running short of iMacs, Wu makes the following bullet points:

• Timing: “In our experience, when AAPL sends an advisory to its channel partners of limited availability and inventory of existing models are drawn down, it is highly likely that a product refresh is within a few weeks.”
• Specs: Wu is now hearing that the new iMacs will be available in both dual-core and quad-core models. “We believe this makes sense as this helps AAPL create better tiers within the iMac family, utilizing quad-core for the high-end, and dual-core for mid-range and low-end.”
• Market share: Wu estimates that the iMac accounted for 25% of Apple’s Mac business last quarter (portables accounted for more than 70%) but could account for as much as 36% after a refresh.
• Mac Pro: He believes Apple’s high-end tower, while less important than the iMac, is also likely to get updated. “We think a refresh utilizing upcoming Intel ‘Nehalem’ 8-core processors (and with two enabling a 16-core) would bring it better price performance and help jump start this highly profitable segment.”

Wu leaves himself considerable wiggle room in terms of timing. Even as he writes about an update within a few weeks, he quotes sources indicating that the iMac is “due for a refresh in the March or June quarters.”

The March quarter wraps up in eight weeks. The end of the June quarter is 20 weeks away.

See also: Why the iMac is late