Image: Apple

Can Apple regain its status as a Wall Street darling?

So far 2008 has not been kind to the technology trendsetter. With U.S. iPod sales slowing and iPhone hype fading, investors have been seized by worries that the crew in Cupertino isn’t much of a growth story anymore. The stock has fallen 40 percent from its recent highs, losing some $50 billion in market value –and it isn’t clear what could turn things around.

It does seem certain that major relief won’t come from Apple’s (AAPL) newest products. This week’s update of the MacBook laptop line adds speed and memory, but no breathtaking design touches. The super-slim but pricey MacBook Air laptop that CEO Steve Jobs unveiled in January has met with mixed reviews, and won’t provide enough of a boost to make up for the iPod slowdown. And Apple TV, the second incarnation of Apple’s failed attempt to bring digital downloads to the television, doesn’t seem to be attracting an iPod-like following either; on Amazon (AMZN), it’s about as popular as a niche backup hard drive.

So where will Apple go for a sales boost to lift its stock? Perhaps overseas.

Even as U.S. tech spending slows, the market for high-tech gear and the opportunity for Apple to grow, is rapidly expanding in Europe and Asia. To wit: Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Mark Hurd noted last week that emerging markets accounted for nearly half of the industry’s PC shipments at the end of 2007, and well over half of the growth.

Shoppers headed online in droves on Cyber Monday, according to the latest stats: 32.5 million visitors entered virtual stores, up 10 percent from a year ago.

Facebook’s unique audience grew by 1.5 million people in October, according to a report released this week by Nielsen Online. That’s five times the rate of larger rival MySpace, which grew by about 300,000.

InterActiveCorp (IACI), a multi-billion-dollar company that manages online brands including Ask.com, Evite and LendingTree, scored its strongest traffic growth this summer from a site that helps people manage their timeshare vacations.

The company reported earnings today. Profit for the quarter that ended Sept. 30 fell to $71.8 million, or 24 cents per share, from $74.9 million, or 24 cents, last year. The 4.2 percent drop was attributed to troubles in the company’s home shopping network business. Revenue grew 7.4 percent to $1.52 billion.

Microsoft (MSFT) mostly saw modest increases in traffic to its online properties in the third quarter, with gaming, technology, real estate and search leading the company’s growth.

Image: http://store.apple.com

If its online traffic is any guide, Apple (AAPL) had a pretty decent quarter.

The maker of iPods, iPhones and Macs grew its online traffic 18 percent compared to a year earlier, from a monthly average of 36.6 million unique visitors to 43 million, according to Nielsen Online. Total minutes at the site grew 22 percent, from 7 billion in calendar Q3 2006 to 8.6 billion in calendar Q3 2007.

Nielsen also said that in September, Apple’s online traffic ranked number one in its category, hardware manufacturers.

Apple’s cost to build the iPod classic is 11 percent lower than the previous verison, iSuppli estimates. Photo: Apple

Apple’s (AAPL) redesign of the iPod classic has allowed the company to make better profits while also offering more storage, an analysis from researcher iSuppli has found.

The iSuppli numbers (below) help shed light on how Apple continues to make money off of its iPod line even as certain versions mature. iSuppli estimates that the components in the iPod cost $127 for the 80-gigabyte version and $190 for the 160GB version. Apple sells them for $249 and $349. (iSuppli’s figures don’t factor in costs for manufacturing, software development, marketing, packaging and shipping. They also don’t factor in some volume discounts Apple receives.)

According to iSuppli, the 80GB iPod costs 11 percent less to build than the previous 30GB version. Apple makes even better margins on the 160GB version.

Increasingly, though, the hard drive-based iPod classic seems to be a niche product. The iPod nano, a sleeker flash memory-based product with less storage capacity, has consistently outsold the classic. And now, based on one month of sales, it seems Apple’s new iPod touch, the flash-based iPhone look-alike, might outsell the classic as well.

Microsoft’s (MSFT) search business maintained strong growth in September, gaining on second-place Yahoo (YHOO). But Google (GOOG) remained the search leader, handling 54 percent of U.S. queries, according to Nielsen Online.

Looking at the September numbers alone, it appears that Microsoft accomplished a coup with its 71.5 percent year-over-year gain in search volume, capturing 12 percent of the market. But Microsoft’s growth hasn’t been steady. In July it handled nearly 14 percent of search queries according to Nielsen, and in April it handled just 9 percent. Google, meanwhile, has consistently captured about 55 percent of searches, and Yahoo about 20 percent.

News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace is still king of the hill in social networking, but rival Facebook was climbing fast in September, according to the latest numbers released today from Nielsen Online. MySpace registered 58.6 million unique visitors in September, up a respectable 24 percent from a year before. But Facebook turned on the turbo jets: it registered 18 million unique visitors, up 133 percent.

Master Chief image: Microsoft

Leave it to Master Chief to save the day. U.S. video game console sales more than doubled in September compared to the year before, and it had everything to do with Halo 3, the game in which he’s the star.

According to data from NPD Group, Americans purchased 1.37 million game consoles last month, up from 613,500 a year ago. The most popular machine, selling 527,800 units, was Microsoft’s Xbox 360, the only one that can play Microsoft’s (MSFT) Halo game. A close second was Nintendo’s Wii, at 501,000 units.

And those numbers tell only part of the story. Sony (SNE) sold 119,400 PlayStation 3s, and 215,000 PlayStation 2s, for a combined 334,400 units. And though portable game systems weren’t included in the overall console tally, Sony’s revamped PlayStation Portable sold 284,500 units, making it the month’s most popular Sony system.