This is the port that gives Macs profoundly fast connections to external hard drives that support the technology, and which also drives high-end displays on a single shared connection.

Now there’s word out of Taiwan’s Digitimes that Intel is going to bring the technology to other PC makers as soon as April of 2012. Sony, Asustek and Acer are said to be among the first in line for Thunderbolt. Missing from that list, however, are such major PC makers as Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

Apple, which has a long history of being early to adopt input-output technologies — it was the first to put USB ports on its PCs with the first iMac in 1998, and it invented FireWire — has had Thunderbolt exclusively on the Mac since it debuted new MacBooks in February. Intel reached out to Apple in 2009 in order to popularize the technology, which was originally known as Light Peak.

Acer and Asustek had each expected to sell between 200,000 and 300,000 ultrabooks by the end of the year. Sadly, the demand to support those numbers just doesn’t seem to be there. Channel sources tell DigiTimes that the two companies are currently on track to ship only 100,000 ultrabooks or so each in 2011.

The reason: “Unclear market demand.”

Of course, it’s still quite early in the ultrabook timeline. The concept won’t even support all of Intel’s requirements for it for at least another year. So it’s conceivable that second-generation devices may be quite a bit more popular than their predecessors. Indeed, some expect the ultrabook to account for 10 percent of the entire notebook market by spring of 2012.

In a repeat of a trend seen last quarter, both firms report that the market shrank in the first quarter of the year. This would constitute the first market contraction in six quarters, and the first since the onset of the recession. They differ, however, on the size of that contraction: IDC pegs it at 3.2 percent since the first quarter of 2010; Gartner at 1.1 percent.

To be fair, let’s remember that the first quarter of the year is always seasonably slow for PC purchases because two things tend to happen in the fourth quarter: Consumers splurge on gifts for family and frankly for themselves too, and take advantage of crazy deals offered by retailers desperate to clear out their inventory. On the business side, some CIOs take the opportunity to use up unspent funds in their budgets, and get employees starting off the new year with a fresh new machine at their desks. However, this tendency is just as often offset by the start of a new budget year. Whichever way you slice it, the first quarter is always weak on consumer sales though a bit stronger on the enterprise side.

So what happened? The iPad 2, for one thing. “With the launch of the iPad 2 in February, more consumers either switched to buying an alternative device, or simply held back from buying PCs,” is how Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, put it. “We’re investigating whether this trend is likely to have a long-term effect on the PC market.” Ya think?

Bob O’Donnell, IDC’s vice president for Clients and Displays, wasn’t quite as willing to blame the iPad: “Slower than expected commercial growth in the first quarter failed to offset the ongoing challenges in the consumer market,” he said in a statement. “While it’s tempting to blame the decline completely on the growth of media tablets, we believe other factors, including extended PC lifetimes and the lack of compelling new PC experiences, played equally significant roles.”

Jay Chou, another IDC analyst put it much more succinctly: “‘Good-enough computing’ has become a firm reality.”

The picture gets no better when you look at regional results. IDC says shipments declined in the U.S. by 10 percent. Gartner pegged it at 6 percent. It was, Gartner noted, the third consecutive quarter for year-on-year declines in U.S. notebook sales. Shipments in Europe contracted too, and Japan, which was already expected to be a weak market this quarter, has other things on its mind since the devastating earthquake and tsunami. Asia was the only bright spot, where shipments increased by 5.6 percent in IDC’s forecast and 4.1 percent in Gartner’s. China, IDC noted, failed to reach double-digit growth, and consumers in India, Gartner says, were distracted by the Cricket World Cup. Okay, then.

So how do the numbers look? Since IDC’s forecast is the most dire, I’ll start there:

The worldwide demand for PCs was 80.6 million units. Hewlett-Packard sold 15.2 million; Dell, which just made it back to second place, shipped 10.3 million; Acer 9 million; Lenovo 8.2 million; Toshiba 4.8 million; while “others” clocked 33 million. All vendors except for Lenovo saw declines. The worst decline was Acer’s, whose shipments fell nearly 16 percent. (Now we know why its CEO Gianfranco Lanci lost his job.) Lenovo, on the other hand, saw its shipments improve by more than 16 percent.

Demand in the U.S. was 16.1 million. HP led with 4.3 million, Dell 3.7 million, Toshiba 1.6 million, Apple 1.4 million and Acer 1.3 million. Unnamed others sold 3.7 million. Acer saw its shipments fall by an alarming 42 percent. Apple and Toshiba posted gains of 9.6 and 10.4 percent respectively. HP and Dell both saw declines.

Now let’s look at Gartner’s numbers (remember that each firm tracks the market a little differently):

Gartner pegged the worldwide market at 84.2 million units. It says HP sold 14.8 million, Acer 10.9 million, Dell 10 million, Lenovo 8.2 million, Toshiba 4.8 million. (Clearly there’s a difference in how they see Acer and Lenovo’s performances.)

In the U.S., Gartner estimated the market at 16.1 million units. By its reckoning, HP sold 4.2 million, Dell 3.6 million, Acer 1.8 million, Toshiba 1.7 million, Apple 1.5 million, others 3.3 million.

Silver Lake, a private equity firm with investments in Skype and other technology companies, has invested an undisclosed amount in PrimeSense Inc., a company behind some of the key ingredients in Kinect, a device that lets Xbox 360 players operate games with body movements. One of the hit products of the holiday season, Microsoft says it shipped more than 8 million Kinects in the product’s first 60 days on the market.

The Kinect’s success has put a spotlight on the category of gesture recognition, an area PrimeSense is seeking to develop with a variety of new non-game applications. At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, the PC maker Asustek showed off a product called the Wave Xtion that uses PrimeSense to navigate Web content and other PC applications on a television set. PrimeSense also showed its technology in action with televisions from Haier and others.

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Tablet-style computers–a moribund hardware category until the iPad started generating buzz earlier this year–are expected to be a big topic at next week’s Computex trade show, a major forum for product announcements by manufacturers of personal computers.

Acer Inc. and Dell Inc. (DELL) unveiled plans for tablet-style machines in advance of the Taipei event, and other companies, such as Asustek Computer Inc., are expected to provide details on similar devices. Makers of semiconductors and other components are also scrambling for a position in the market.

But when it comes to tablets, operating systems and applications may become even more important differentiators–just as software became a huge advantage for Apple with the iPhone.

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The answer may not be simple. While Intel argues that netbooks are doing just fine, it’s possible that they could make even more money if they are wrong.

To understand that paradox, recall a few attributes about this new computer category. These are small notebooks, typically priced at $350 or less, which are typically powered by a low-end Intel chip called Atom. Heavily promoted by PC makers like Asustek and Acer–and egged on by Intel–netbooks were a hot item even as the recession was at its peak.

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“…the PC and the mobile will continue to come closer and merge,” Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said at a press conference in New Dehli. “A lot of opportunity can be seen in this converged area. We at Nokia is actively looking at this converged market….We are looking at the netbook market to see what kind of opportunity is there.”

Likely a decent one for a cellphone maker like Nokia looking to diversify a bit from its core business. The company’s Symbian smartphone platform could likely be optimized for the task were Nokia to bring some of its $6 billion R&D budget to bear on it. The OS already has a Microsoft-compatible office suite in MobiSystems OfficeSuite 4, so Nokia’s ahead of the game there. Question is: Might the company’s efforts be better directed toward developing a credible competitor to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone?

“We believe the netbook market is starting to make inroads into the core notebook market as a more price-conscious consumer opts for the cheaper alternative,” he wrote in his Intel note this morning. Intel is addressing the netbook market with its Atom processor, so the company is not being cut out of the food chain; but Rakesh notes that Atom processors sell at much lower price points and carry thinner gross margins. The Atom, he notes, sells for $20-$40 and carries a 45 percent gross margin, while the Core2Duo sells for $140-$250 and carries a gross margin of 56 percent.

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