Current sales and market share for PCs – Apple’s at 4.3%. But keep in mind Apple is NOT a pc company, they’re a software, hardware AND electronics company.

Instead they have a zillion versions, with different brand names, and different UIs, and different configurations.

They may offer more technical features, but clearly millions of buyers don’t particularly want those features.

*you might not know this software but it’s used in just about every major movie and a lot of ads

I suspect that inflates the iPod’s media footprint considerably.

(And, really, the other brands use so many names for their products that there is no more economical term than ‘iPod’.)

(another link, in case Brad takes down one of the double posts)

Additionally, I’ll note that Apple’s cultivated stance of caring, about user experience goes a long way toward explaining the fawning. In an era when using a PC, at home or at the office, can seem more like armed combat than work or leisure, the notion that a company is seriously trying to make stuff Just Work generates an enormous amount of good-will, even when they completely flub it.

To wit: Apple hardware is cased in shiny, clean white plastic with rounded edges. (Yes, the iPod Minis come in colors and the Nano in black; ignore for now.)

The subliminal likeness is to bathroom fixtures. This invokes an association with purity and cleanness (for the devotees of Apple) or with excretion (Apple products are shit, for the haters of Mac products). There is no middle ground.

My favorites were from Old English, though the bit about “the embodiment of style and cool” and an alternate universe reminded me most of Move to Iceland.

And, of course, who doesn’t want a Beowolf cluster of atomic super-men?

The point of my comment was to say that when people complain about the media’s coverage of Apple, as opposed to their favorite consumer electronics manufacturer, they complain that the media is covering the iPod – an admittedly feature-poor product when compared with some alternatives.

However, the story is not that Apple released a new iPod that plays video – rather that Steve Jobs has likely introduced the first video pay-to-download distribution channel that will be a smashing success. Why do we think it will be a success, and thus worthy of press and commentary? Because he did a similar thing to the music industry armed only with a feature-poor MP3 player and desktop software.

And hey, we also covered the iFlea and the diePod.