Day 2 of Apple puffery

After Monday's forecast in which he foretold Apple moving 45 million iPhones during 2009, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is back with another aggressive estimate.

Shipments of Macs, like this new MacBook Pro, were up 60 percent in February, according to NPD.

(Credit: Apple)

On Tuesday, Munster released a research note in which he estimates that Apple's U.S. consumer market share for Macs stands at 21 percent, while its worldwide share is about 10 percent. He comes to this conclusion by using numbers released by market research firm IDC, which found that Apple's worldwide share of the PC market grew from 2.4 percent to 2.9 percent between 2006 and 2007. He notes that 70 percent of the global PC market is enterprise computing, a sandbox in which Apple doesn't often play, so the 21 percent refers just to the consumer business in the U.S.

These are just estimates, but it does appear Apple is at least off to an impressive start this year. NPD, which tracks retail sales only, also found evidence of notable growth for Apple's computer business in the month of February. NPD estimated that overall Mac shipments were up 60 percent, compared with the rest of the PC industry, which grew at a 9 percent clip.

Munster also gathered data from Dell.com, HP.com, Lenovo.com, and more and concluded that though Macs are often knocked for being outrageously expensive compared with their Windows-running counterparts, the average Apple desktop is 16 percent pricier and notebooks 9 percent more expensive.