January was a slow month for Apple (AAPL) — even slower than Wall Street thought it was going to be.

Mac unit sales were down 6% compared with last January, according to NPD data released Tuesday. iPod sales fared even worse, down 14% year to year.

The Street was expecting Mac sales to be off by only 4% and iPod sales off 11%, according to Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster.

In a report to clients issued Tuesday afternoon, Munster estimated that Mac sales for the March quarter (Apple's second fiscal quarter) will be somewhere between 2 and 2.2 million units. iPod sales should come in around 9 to 10 million units.

Putting an optimistic spin on the data, as he is wont to do, Munster saw the Mac numbers as "a neutral or slight positive" given the general uncertainty about the whole economy this quarter.

But, he adds, February and March could be "a tough comparison" for the Macintosh, because Mac sales last February were bolstered by the launch of the MacBook Air. There is no comparable MacBook launch expected this February.

Munster also found something to cheer about in the iPod numbers, even though he now expects unit sales to fall 6% to 15%  by the end of the quarter. "Given concerns regarding iPod  weakness," he writes, "we believe the segment's in-line performance relative to  Street expectations is a positive." He was also pleased by the average price for iPods in January, which was up 4%. He had expected it to fall 3%.

Acknowledging that it's difficult to extrapolate iPod sales prices from one month of NPD data, Munster thinks they may have risen because the contribution of higher-priced iPod touches in the mix "may exceed our expectations in the Mar quarter."

Munster maintains a buy rating on Apple shares with a target of $180, one of the highest in the business. The stock closed Tuesday at $94.53, down 4.67% for the day.

What's up with the MacBook Air?

The road warrior's favorite Apple (AAPL) notebook, pulled with great fanfare from an interoffice envelope by Steve Jobs at Macworld 2008, is being steeply discounted this weekend, on the eve of Macworld 2009.

The entry level machine (1.6 GHz, 2GB) is still listed on the Apple Store at its original price — albeit with a 50% larger hard drive and a new graphics chipset. But if you act quickly, you can get it for a lot less.

A quick Sunday-morning survey turned up a wide range of prices:

• Apple Store (120 GB hard drive): $1,799.00
• Amazon (120 GB): $1,739.99
• MacMall* (120 GB): $1739.99
• MacMall* (80 GB): $1,149.99
• Apple Store (80 GB refurbished): $1,149.00

*Note that MacMall — which tosses in a free Epson printer, a free USB hub, free Parallels, free Toast and free shipping — has scheduled its sale to end Monday at 11:59 p.m. PST, nine hours before the start of Phil Schiller's Macworld keynote.

Could Schiller have a MacBook Air upgrade up his sleeve?

Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray's top Apple (AAPL) analyst, published one of his trademark "unanswered questions" reports early Tuesday morning. You can read the full text — with all 12 questions and answers — at AppleInsider here. Or you can read the bullet points:

• A netbook in 2009. Although Steve Jobs has said the company "doesn't do cheap," Munster thinks Apple could do well this year with a 11" MacBook Air priced between $800 and $1,000. He doesn't expect a tablet Mac before 2010.
• The $630 iPhone. That's how much Munster believes Apple is getting, on average, from the carriers. He also believes that with falling component prices, Apple could lower its price to its partners by as much as $150 over the next six months and still maintain its profit margins.
• An iPhone in China. The phone's international rollout is "still in its early stages," says Munster, and he expects an announcement from one of the two big Chinese carriers (China Mobile, with 550 million subscribers, or China Unicom, with 128 million) within the next month or two.
• New iPhones. "Most investors believe the iPhone hardware will be the same throughout 2009 as it is today; we disagree," writes Munster. Quoting Steve Jobs' October remarks about not leaving a "price umbrella" below today's iPhone, Munster is looking for new phones on both the low (below $199) and high (above $299) end.
• The shrinking iPod. Munster is modeling a 12% contraction in unit sales year to year for fiscal 2009. That said, he believes the iPod remains a key "entry point into the Apple device ecosystem."
• iPhone gift cards. Because you now must activate new iPhones in store rather than at home, it's hard to buy an iPhone as a gift. Munster suggests that Apple may take a page from AT&T's (T) book and offer iPhone gift cards this holiday season. UPDATE: Reader Warren from Buffalo points out that Apple already offers iPhone gift cards.
• The last Apple bull. Despite the economic downturn and the fact that Apple was trading for $79.55 earlier this week – almost a two-year low — Munster is stubbornly sticking with his 2009 target of $250 a share.

Japan continues to be "our most challenging major market," Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer told analysts last month during the company's fiscal fourth quarter earnings conference call.

That may be, but one of the numbers that jumps out of the Form 10-K that the company filed with the SEC on Wednesday is 39% — the percentage Apple's net sales grew in Japan last year.

What makes that number remarkable is that it follows an 11% drop in net sales the year before.

Why the turnaround? According to the 10-K report, it was driven by sales of iPods, iMacs, MacBooks and "strong sales from the iTunes Store." The report singles out Mac net sales and unit sales, which grew 42% and 20%, respectively.

Apple (AAPL) attributes the declines between 2006 and 2007 to general shrinkage in Japan's consumer PC market and lower average selling prices of iPods.

The MacBook and MacBook Air contributed to the increase in net sales in fiscal 2008, as did strong demand for the iPod touch and iPod nanos at higher average selling prices.

Here are the numbers Apple provides:

The report does not mention sales of the iPhone in Japan, which after the initial excitement this summer are said to have slowed. See here.

According to the 10-K, "The company is continuing to evaluate ways to improve the future results of its Japanese segment."

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 prohibitively expensive solid-state version of Apple's MacBook Air is suddenly 16% less so.

While Apple watchers were focused on the upcoming launch of the iPhone 3G, the company quietly lopped $500 off the 64-GB SSD MacBook Air, reducing it overnight from $3,098 to $2,598.

The price cut, just six months after the product was introduced, is at least partly the result of Apple's transition from expensive single-level cell flash to multi-level cell technology (see here) and steadily falling NAND flash memory prices across the board. But it may also reflect increased competition in the thin notebook market and sluggish sales for the driveless version, which hasn't quite delivered either the speed or power savings customers had expected.

Kudos to AppleInsider's Slash Lane, who seems to have been first to note the price cut with a post published at 1:00 p.m. ET.

Special mention to MacRumors' Arnold Kim, who caught Apple (AAPL) doing the right thing for customers who ordered the Air at one price and will receive it at another:

To Our Valued Apple Customer:

Apple has announced a price drop for a component(s) of the MacBook Air that you recently ordered. We have automatically adjusted your order to reflect the new lower price.

For up-to-date information on your order, please visit our Order Status website at . After your order is shipped, you can also obtain tracking information on this site.

Thank you for your shopping at the Apple Store.

Sincerely,

Apple Online Store Support (link)

There's a Sherman Adams-style political controversy heating up in South America in which the role of the vicuna fur coat is played by a MacBook Air.

The star is Cristina Kirchner, the president of Argentina — the second woman to hold that office (after Isabel Martinez de Peron).

The supporting role is played by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, the second richest man in the world, who controls Telefonos de Mexico (TMX) and thus telecommunications over much of Latin America. His name came up in association with Apple earlier this month when Steve Jobs chose his wireless spinoff, America Movil (AMX), to bring the iPhone to 16 countries in Central America, South America and the Caribbean. (see here)

The story begins when billionaire Slim gave President Kirchner the gift of a slim, elegant MacBook Air. The Argentine press got hold of a photograph of the event and began stirring up trouble for La Pinguina, as they have nicknamed her (because of her husband's roots in southern Argentina).

The issue, for several Argentinian newspapers (see here, for example, in Spanish) is whether a MacBook Air, which can fetch more than AR$9,600 in the devalued Argentinian dollar ($3,096 in U.S. dollars), should be considered a "luxury item" — something the President is forbidden by article 256 of the Penal Code to accept as a personal gift.

The code is usually invoked for really big items, like the $120,000 red Ferrari one of her predecessors, Carlos Menem, was forced to turn over to the state.

At least one Argentinian lawyer has come to Kirchner's defense, arguing that by comparison a MacBook Air might be considered just a "courtesy," a thing of "little value." (see here)

Maybe in Argentina.

Anway, thanks for the tip goes to Investor Village's boxerconan, who sees the whole thing as more free publicity for Apple (AAPL). Thanks also to macenstein for the link to the photograph. For more on the story, see huibert-aalbers.com.