Apple Investors' Hope for the Holidays

No one knows for sure what the holiday shopping season will bring Apple, but it's looking increasingly like some good times.

I've spent some time talking about this on the air: the anecdotal scenarios I'm tracking from one Apple [AAPL 92.76 -2.24 (-2.36%) ] store to the next. Little elbow room, lots of foot traffic, lines at the cash registers, and a whole lot busy employees. Thousands of them, apparently, based on a recent Apple filing that highlighted a hiring surge for its retail operations.

Well, anecdotal now meets market research in the form of new data from Piper Jaffray. Sure, analyst Gene Munster is a long-time Apple bull, but that shouldn't diminish from the firm's expectation that Apple will enjoy a record-breaking Mac sales quarter — something north of 2.6 million units. And a phenomenal sales performance of its iPhone — something around another 6 million units.

The iPhone numbers bear a little more study. Piper says Apple's U.S. stores are selling an average 25 iPhone 3Gs a day at every location, down from over 90 a few months ago. That sounds bad, until you realize those figures don't include international sales, iPhone's unit sales at Best Buy, and what's expected to be very strong sales through year-end.

Piper suspects a 5 percent to 15 percent sequential iPhone sales decline (the firm expects an 8 percent decline, by the way). That's a far cry from the fall-off-a-cliff 40 percent plunge some were anticipating in iPhone sales.

Those numbers are all the more striking, following Apple's grim holiday shopping quarter expectations, which fell way below analyst projections. Apple normally sandbags, but not to the extent it did this last time. So against that backdrop, the Piper numbers stand out even further, suggesting that Apple may not be recession-averse, but recession-proof.

It stands to reason, too: shoppers may be holding back for one big, splashy purchase. Which means that, indeed, there might be a significant retail slowdown. Unless you're the one company offering what those consumers are looking for, for that one splashy purchase.

Apple's never had the breadth of product offerings it has for this shopping season: a new family of iPods, those new MacBooks, the iPhone 3G and its robust App Store; the delay of the BlackBerry Bold, which gave iPhone an in where it might not have had one otherwise; ongoing Windows Vista adoption issues; more and more corporate customers opening their enterprises to the Mac platform.

There are many key trends lining up in Apple's favor that make the Piper numbers less surprising than you might think.

My thoughts: What keeps surprising me is the sheer reluctance of Apple naysayers, shorts and others to embrace Apple's success and give this company its due. Too much to expect, I guess, but you have to figure at some point facts will eclipse fiction and Apple shares will be off to the races once again.