Apple dominates three Amazon categories

Yesterday I crowned Apple the new king of retail when it was revealed that the company's retail stores brought in more annual sales per square foot than any other retailer including heavyweights like Best Buy, Neiman Marcus and Tiffany & Co.
In addition to Apple's impressive sales per square foot it's also worth noting that Apple currently holds the top spot in three categories at Amazon.com: MP3 players, notebooks and desktops.

The MP3 category isn't that surprising considering the success of the iPod. The notebook category is dominated by two MacBooks which isn't that surprising either because they run Windows seamlessly and have the best price-to-performance ratio of any Macs ever built.
The real coup for Apple is with Amazon's desktop category where the iMac dominates the first and second spots. In fact, Apple really owns the entire top 10 of true desktops because the Mac mini is number seven and all the other items in the category are books or accessories.
Although Amazon had their best year ever in sales, they're still just one retailer of Apple products. Amazon also doesn't sell Dell, the number one PC retailer so their rankings should be viewed with that in mind. But either way, there's no denying that, to quote Tom Brokaw in an old clip on "Inside story of... iPod" yesterday on Discovery, "the Mac is back."

In related news, the swarm of people that received new iPods and/or iTunes gift cards over the holidays overwhelmed the iTunes store prompting error messages and lengthly delays.