Zynga was up 42 cents, or almost 5 percent today, to close at $8.87 a share.

That’s a huge reversal from earlier this week when the stock nosedived to an all-time low. Meanwhile, none of the traditional game makers were having such a good day.

Electronic Arts closed down $1.47, or 7.5 percent, to $18.04 a share; THQ fell 7 percent to 66 cents a share; Take-Two Interactive fell .5 percent to $14.50 a share; and industry-leading Activision Blizzard slipped 2.5 percent $12.24 a share. GameStop also traded lower, finishing off the day down 2.8 percent to $23.51 a share.

The game makers were universally feeling the impact of an NPD Group report that revealed yesterday that videogame software sales fell 8 percent in December compared to the same month in 2010. When including hardware and accessories, like game cards, the entire industry contracted by 21 percent year over year.

Potentially, investors were betting that if the traditional game-makers weren’t fairing well, then Zynga was a good bet. The leading Facebook game-maker operates purely online and on mobile, so it potentially would be more isolated from the retail and packaged goods sectors.

The old guard vs. new guard battle also played out on the front lines yesterday.

EA was dealt an additional blow when Zynga announced it had hired away Barry Cottle, head of Electronic Arts’ Interactive division. Cottle, who was in charge of the company’s digital strategy, including social and mobile games, was EA’s biggest weapon in fighting Zynga’s dominance on Facebook and had led EA’s rise on mobile.

But EA’s loss was Zynga’s gain.

The social games leader appointed Cottle to the position of EVP of business and corporate development in charge of new global partnerships, acquisitions and other development roles.

Even the smallest of businesses are considering tablets, though only 54 percent of those with fewer than 50 employees are planning on buying a tablet, compared with 73 percent of all businesses with fewer than 1,000 workers. That last figure is up five percentage points from a quarter earlier, NPD said.

On average, the small businesses surveyed plan to spend around $21,000 on tablets in the coming year, though that amount varies greatly based on the size of the firm.

“Businesses of all sizes appear to be determined to capitalize on the tablet phenomenon,” NPD analyst Stephen Baker said in a statement. “The iPad, just as it is in the consumer market, is synonymous for ‘tablet’ in the business market.”

New research from NPD finds that smartphones are now responsible for more than a quarter of the photos and videos people take in the U.S. About 27 percent of photographs taken in 2011 were captured by smartphones, up from 17 percent last year. Meanwhile, about 44 percent were taken with single-purpose cameras. That’s down from 52 percent in 2010. Standard cellphones, camcorders, webcams and tablets account for the remainder.

So, a significant decline, and one indicative of a trend that’s been emerging for years now: The smartphone as “good enough” camera. With our phones packing increasingly better cameras and improved optics, the reasons for carrying a dedicated point-and-shoot are growing fewer — unless you’re a professional photographer or a hobbyist. And that’s having a deleterious effect on the camera market. According to NPD’s Retail Tracking Service, the point-and-shoot camera market declined 17 percent in units and 18 percent in dollars for the first 11 months of 2011.

The NPD Group released a new report today that calculated the amount of money Americans are spending on games from the nontraditional market. That includes a lot of digital content, such as subscriptions, digital downloads, social games and mobile games, but also used games and rentals.

In the third quarter, it found that the amount spent on that “other content” totaled $1.64 billion.

While significant, NPD said it wasn’t enough to offset lower revenue from the traditional game market. NPD defines the traditional market as packaged goods sold at retail. In the third quarter, that totaled $1.3 billion.

“New physical retail sales had a rough third quarter,” said Anita Frazier, an analyst with NPD. “Increases in sales from some of these other monetization methods, and full game and add-on digital downloads in particular, only partially offset the decline see in the new physical retail channel.”

She said the overall market, including hardware, totaled $4.2 billion, down 11 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

For companies like Electronic Arts, which is investing heavily in mobile and social games and is placing big bets on online content, like today’s release of Star Wars: The Old Republic, the results of these monthly and quarterly reports are unrepresentative of the trends they are seeing.

“Everything is growing. If you look at the total interactive business, it’s a $50 billion market internationally, and that’s up double digits. That’s where we play,” said EA’s President of Labels Frank Gibeau. “We find it frustrating because it doesn’t tell the whole picture.”

In the second quarter, EA’s digital revenue, which includes downloadable console content, mobile and social — was up 30 percent year over year.

Even a company like Activision, which has been slower to develop games on Facebook and mobile, said that during the second quarter, revenue from digital channels — mostly downloadable content — increased 27 percent year ove year, and accounted for 37 percent of the company’s total net revenue.

For all-digital companies, like Zynga, which went public last week to raise $1 billion, its impact hardly seems to register.

“I think that ultimately we are an interactive entertainment company, not a packaged goods company,” Gibeau said. “We are platform and channel agnostic. The physical channel is a great channel and it’s going to be around longer than people think. … We are fine with that model, but then, when you bring that game home, you should be able to connect to the larger online world.”

“This November marks the best November on record for sales of new physical content,” said NPD Group’s Anita Frazier.

Activision said within the first five days of sales, Call of Duty shattered all previous entertainment records, grossing more than $775 million. In fact, its first month of sales beat the game’s predecessor by about 7 percent, NPD added.

In NPD’s report released today, it analyzed videogame sales for November, taking into account sales made at retail across both hardware and software. It excludes the sale of digital content, like mobile games and downloadable content.

In November, NPD said software sales totaled $1.7 billion, jumping 15 percent from $1.45 billion in the same month last year. Hardware sales weren’t so lucky, falling 9 percent to $982 million from $1.1 billion in November 2010.

The second-most popular title during the month was Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for Xbox, PlayStation and the PC. “In one month, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is just about half a million units shy of matching Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in lifetime sales. Its first month performance was a five-fold increase over Oblivion’s first month sales,” Frazier said.

The rest of the titles in the top 10 are:

• Battlefield 3, Electronic Arts
• Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Ubisoft
• Just Dance, Ubisoft
• Madden NFL 12, Electronic Arts
• Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, Sony
• Saints Row: The Third, THQ
• The Legend of Zelda: SkywardSword, Nintendo
• Batman: Arkham City, Warner Bros. Interactive

And things are actually worse than that. Topping the list compiled by NPD was Hewlett-Packard, which only sold that many tablets thanks to a billion dollar fire sale.

HP accounted for 17 percent of those tablets, just ahead of Samsung, which had 16 percent of the market, followed by Asus, Motorola and Acer, which each had around a 9 or 10 percent share.

Of course, that means things were even more dismal for the other companies vying for tablet share, a list that includes HTC, Toshiba, Research In Motion and Dell, to name just a few.

NPD analyst Stephen Baker sees the very small glass as half full.

“If you look at the tablet market without Apple there are a number of high-profile brands vying for that number two spot,” Baker said in a statement, adding that three quarters of those who bought a tablet were not even considering an iPad, which he said is “an indication that a large group of consumers are looking for alternatives, and an opportunity for the rest of the market to grow their business.”

And of course, things are getting more interesting thanks to Amazon and its Kindle Fire.

But Baker also notes that the market is awfully crowded and there is not much left to go around.

That’s a 20 percent increase over the first half of the year. And, as you can see from the chart below, the spike in sales occurred with the July launch of the new hardware and has been trending upward ever since. So in four months the Air has gone from less than 10 percent of Apple’s notebook business to nearly a third of it. How much will it comprise by 2012?

Close to 50 percent? That might seem like a stretch, though some analysts have been forecasting it for a while. Back in July, Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore predicted that sales of the Air could ramp to as high as 1.5 million per quarter, which is indeed about half of Apple’s MacBook business. Obviously, they’ve still got a way to go. But we haven’t yet hit the holiday consumer binge. And 2012 could bring with it a new 15-inch Air, destined to drive sales of the machine higher still …

The machine is on a real growth tear. New metrics from research outfit NPD show Mac sales up 19 percent year over year in October.

That upward trend bodes well for the company as it heads into the holiday shopping season. Indeed, extrapolating from those numbers, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster figures Apple will sell between 5.1 million and 5.3 million Macs during the December quarter, accounting for about 18 percent of overall revenue for the period.

That’s year-over-year growth of between 23 percent and 28 percent. Impressive. More so, considering the state of the PC market, which these days is suffering from slowing sales growth.

In all, physical sales of both hardware and software totaled $1.08 billion, up from $1.07 billion year over year, according to NPD Group’s monthly U.S. game industry report.

The biggest console performer was the Xbox for the ninth month in a row. It sold 393,000 units, up 21 percent compared to October 2010 — resulting in a 44 percent industry share.

David Dennis, Group Product Manager of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, told AllThingsD that sales were driven by blockbuster games that started to launch in September and grew in October.

During the month, six of the top 10 console games were available on the Xbox, including Battlefield 3, Batman, NBA 2K12, Rage, and exclusives including Forza Motorsport 4 and Gears of War 3.

The other hardware platform that performed surprisingly well was Nintendo’s portable 3DS, which clearly has benefited from a steep price drop. After a poor reception in July, Nintendo slashed the price of the 3DS to $169.99 from $249.99.

The 3DS was the second-best-selling hardware platform, and when combined with the older DS model sales, Nintendo sold 25 percent more compared to last October.

In all, it sold 1.65 million units, Nintendo said, to put it on track to surpass the first-year total of the Nintendo DS, which sold 2.37 million in its first 12 months on market.

Nintendo’s home console system, the Wii, didn’t do as well. It sold 250,000 units.

Not so: The latest data from research houses Gartner and IDC shows that HP, already the biggest PC maker in the world, managed to grow its share of the market in the most recent quarter, and actually grew faster than the rest of the industry as a whole.

According to Gartner, HP’s share edged up to 17.7 percent in the third quarter from 17.4 percent in the year-ago period, and it sold 16.2 million PCs. By IDC’s reckoning, (Gartner and IDC conduct their counts a little differently) HP commanded an 18.1 percent share of the market, up from 17.8 percent a year ago, and shipped 16.6 million PCs.

The data, along with retail PC sales as tracked by the research firm NPD, is widely watched in the PC industry and, if nothing else, gives some indication as to the reasoning behind the trial balloon story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, which said that HP is rethinking its spinoff plans.

Meanwhile, Dell saw its share fall on both lists, and its position fell to third place behind China’s Lenovo, with Acer coming in fourth on a global basis. Apple maintained its third-place position in the U.S. market and grew its share to nearly 13 percent in the Gartner rankings and north of 11 percent on the IDC list.

For HP, a world-dominating market share is certainly nice to have, but meaningless if it’s not profitable — which it is. In fact, despite declining revenues — sales in HP’s personal systems group fell by about $1 billion in the first nine months of fiscal 2011, to $29.5 billion — the company managed to boost its operating margins from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 6 percent so far this year.

We know most of the reasons for the decline. Apple’s iPad has tamped down demand for conventional notebooks, and HP, having sought to create a competitive response with its TouchPad, didn’t have much luck. The impact is especially pronounced in HP’s notebook sales, which is where most of the billion-dollar drop in sales in the PC division were seen during the first nine months of the year. The results were offset, oddly enough, by a $366 million increase in sales of high-end professional workstation computers.

Still, having a big PC business gives a company like HP the leverage it needs to buy parts from suppliers for its more profitable businesses. In HP’s enterprise storage and networking group, operating margins were about 14 percent in the first nine months of the fiscal year, where sales grew by more than $2 billion.

It is easier to negotiate favorable prices from chip and memory suppliers like Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Micron — and hard drive suppliers like Seagate and Western Digital — when you’re still the world’s biggest consumer of their products. Absent the PC division, HP’s orders from those suppliers would be smaller and incrementally more expensive, as discounts are often negotiated based on the volume of components ordered.

The enterprise business was to be HP’s future under former CEO Léo Apotheker, and there is little question that its emphasis won’t continue to be on the enterprise going forward. But as HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman, chairman Ray Lane and the rest of HP’s management team contemplate the decision to spin off PCs or not, the evidence is mounting that the two faces of HP are inextricably linked.

According to the latest metrics from NPD, domestic Mac sales for the first month of the September quarter were up 26 percent year over year, buoyed by new hardware and an eagerly anticipated update to Apple’s OS X. That’s more than six times the growth of the broader PC market.

And if it continues, Apple will likely meet consensus estimates of 4.5 million total Mac sales for the current quarter, said Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. “We believe Mac sales benefited from the 7/20 launch of OS X Lion along with refreshed MacBook Airs and Mac minis,” Munster explained in a note to clients. “But these tailwinds will fade throughout the September quarter and year-over-year compares get slightly tougher in the last two months of the quarter.”

The softening PC market seems to have had little to no effect on Mac sales. Nor is it likely to in the future, given current growth trends. As I’ve noted here before, Mac sales have outpaced the broader PC market for 21 consecutive quarters now. And there’s little to suggest that streak is coming to an end any time soon.

Said Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes, “We believe Apple will continue to gain share in Macs over the long term even as the iPad grows. Given the data and our checks, our estimate for Mac growth of 18 percent year-over-year for Apple’s C3Q, may turn out to be conservative even though the global economy appears to be slowing quite a bit.”

The research house says the Mac saw a year-over-year sales increase in April 2011 of 9 percent. That’s nowhere near the 22 percent Y-O-Y growth Wall Street is looking for in the entire June quarter.

Why the descrepancy? Simple. April of 2010 is a hell of a tough comparison month.

The refresh of the MacBook Pro line on April 13 drove a 39 percent spike in Mac sales for the month. With no similar refreshes juicing demand in April of 2011, sales aren’t up quite as much.

Which doesn’t mean Apple won’t post that 22 percent increase investors are hoping for. As Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster notes, it’s far too early to make a call on the June quarter, particularly given the launch of new iMacs earlier this month.

In fact, according to NPD weekly data, Apple saw Y-O-Y unit growth in Macs of 35 percent during the first week of May following the May 3 launch of the new quad-core, Thunderbolt iMacs.

According to NPD, Apple leapfrogged both HTC and Motorola to move into the No. 3 spot with 14 percent of the overall phone market, boosted by the arrival of the iPhone on Verizon. Samsung still tops the U.S. market with 23 percent, followed by LG at 18 percent.

“Apple and Verizon had a very successful launch of the iPhone 4, which allowed the iPhone to expand its market share that was previously held back by its prolonged carrier exclusivity with AT&T,” said Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis at NPD, in a statement. “While some of that growth came at the expense of Android operating system, Android models still accounted for half of all smartphones sold in the quarter.”

However, Android’s share of the smartphone market dipped in the quarter, NPD said, to 50 percent in the first quarter from 53 percent in last year’s fourth quarter. Apple’s iOS rose nine percentage points, accounting for 28 percent of smartphone units sold, while BlackBerry lost five points of market share, falling to 14 percent.

For the first time, smartphones overall accounted for more than half of all phones sold in the U.S., with consumers opting for a smartphone 54 percent of the time. That lead to a 2 percent rise in the average selling price of phones, to $102. The trend of more smartphones at lower average prices should continue, Rubin said.

“We’ve started to increasingly see lower-priced handsets come in, both at the major carriers and at some of the regional carriers as well,” Rubin said in a telephone interview. Rubin noted that consumers are starting to move to Android at carriers that cater to the more price-sensitive segments of the market, including carriers such as Cricket, Sprint’s Boost Mobile brand and Metro PCS.

“Despite the higher fees, consumers are adopting those handsets, as they are important to stay in touch with the rest of the world,” Rubin said.

The iPhone 4 was the top individual phone model, followed by the iPhone 3GS, Motorola Droid X, HTC EVO 4G, and HTC Droid Incredible. Overall for the quarter, smartphone sales grew 8 percent from the fourth quarter, but total phone sells fell 1 percent.

In March, Microsoft said it had sold 10 million Kinect sensors in the first four months. But it was evident that sales could be slowing after a huge spike during the holidays.

The two accessories are slightly different but serve the same purpose of extending the life of the videogame console by widening the audience it serves from the hardcore segment to the more casual player.

The Xbox Kinect uses a camera to track the movements of players, so they don’t need to use a controller at all. Generally, the best use case for it so far are games that mimic dancing, but recently, Xbox has started integrating the technology into other services, such as Netflix.

In contrast, the PlayStation Move, which uses a camera and a controller, is more similar to the Nintendo Wii.

Because the player must hold a controller, Sony claims, actions can be much more precise, making the system appropriate for a wider selection of games. There are also peripherals for the controller, such as the Sharp Shooter, which allows a user to simulate shooting a gun. Sony said despite limited supply, 40 percent of the time the Sharp Shooter accessory sold alongside Killzone 3 at key retailers.

During the holidays, Microsoft had a difficult time meeting demand for the Kinect, but supply has since caught up. Today, Sony also reported shortages of the Move.

In a statement, Bob McKenzie, SVP of merchandising for GameStop, said: “Due to the demand for the PlayStation Move motion controller, we’ve been struggling to keep units in stock in our U.S. GameStop stores. With big franchise titles set for release throughout the year for the PlayStation Move, we expect the remainder of 2011 to be a period of continued sales growth for PlayStation Move.”

Sony also said the PS3 has now sold 50 million units worldwide and has more than 75 million registered accounts for the PlayStation Network, which offers downloadable games and entertainment.

The consumer tracking outfit says Reed Hastings’ company owns 61 percent of the market for digital movies, with Comcast running a distant second at eight percent. There’s a three-way tie for third between DirectTV, Time Warner Cable and Apple.

None of which should be terribly surprising: Netflix is in the midst of a go-go growth boom, and while not all of its 20 million subscribers are using the company’s Web video service, many of them are. And a third of its new customers are signing up for its Web-only option.

Meanwhile, Apple’s iTunes movie store, which sells and rents films on an a la carte basis, has yet to catch on as well as Steve Jobs would like. And if you’re going to rent a movie from the cable guys, it seems much more likely that you’ll rent a movie via cable, directly to your TV.

More surprising is NPD’s assertion that digital video “now makes up one quarter of all home video volume.” I’ve got some questions about that statistic: For instance does it include all video, or just movies? And all video, or just legally purchased stuff? Etc. I’ll report back if I can get more detail from the company.

Release:

Six Out Of 10 Digital Movies Are Streamed via Netflix

NPD’s VideoWatch Digital tracking service reveals that subscription streaming, digital movies purchased online, and Internet and cable video-on-demand (VOD) services are becoming a part of many Americans’ entertainment diets.

PORT WASHINGTON, NEW YORK, March 15, 2011 – According to a recent review of the home video market in the U.S. by The NPD Group, a leading market research company, Netflix’s share of digital movie units, downloaded or streamed, reached 61 percent between January 2011 and February 2011, followed by Comcast at 8 percent, and a three-way tie for third at 4 percent among DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, and Apple. Based on information from NPD’s new VideoWatch Digital tracking service, digital video now makes up one quarter of all home video volume.

“Sales of DVDs and Blu-ray Discs still drive most home-video revenue, but VOD and other digital options are now beginning to make inroads with consumers,” said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD. “Overwhelmingly digital movie buyers do not believe physical discs are out of fashion, but their digital transactions were motivated by the immediate access and ease of acquisition provided by streaming and downloading digital video files.”

NPD also compared consumer-reported satisfaction with four modes of digital-video acquisition: electronic sell-through (EST), Internet VOD (iVOD), cable VOD, and subscription streaming. Consumers clearly recognize that EST services like iTunes have the most “current releases available,” while Netflix streaming gets credit from customers for providing the best “overall shopping experience” and “value for price paid.”

Data note: The information in this press release is from VideoWatch Digital, which is based on online surveys of U.S. consumers age 13 and older conducted between January and the third week of February 2011. The final reporting is based on 10,618 completed surveys.

One indicator is the sales of prepaid gaming cards that are purchased at Walmart, Target, 7-11 and many other retailers.

While the game cards are typically purchased in person, they can be used for a range of things, from buying virtual goods within FarmVille  to buying a game that’s digitally delivered over the internet via Xbox Live.

Today, NPD released industry sales figures for February today, reporting that prepaid game cards now account for 22 percent of all accessories sold and that sales have increased 52 percent compared to a year-ago.

Meanwhile, in the same time period console software sales only increased by 2 percent.

NPD’s Analyst Anita Frazier said the jump in game card sales points to the increased importance of digitally distributed content sales within the games industry, and that last month marked the best February on record for accessory sales.

The top-selling item was the Xbox 360 1,600 points card.

Overall, NPD reported that physical retail channel in the U.S. generated video game hardware sales in February of $467 million, increasing 10 percent. Video game software, including console and portable totaled $601.4 million, dropping 5 percent, and video game accessories totaled $257 million, increasing 22 percent.

Traditionally, Apple launches its new MacBook Pros in April, well into its third quarter. This year, it didn’t. It launched them in the second, and that’s where the resulting spike in sales will be reflected.

And if the company sells enough of them, we could see a nice little bump in its earnings-per-share for the period, says UBS analyst Maynard Um.

“The refresh comes with about 6 weeks remaining in what is typically Apple’s seasonally weakest Mac quarter of the year,” Um said in a note to clients. “However, AAPL’s last three MacBook Pro refreshes came in FYQ3, so the accelerated cycle could provide upside to our estimates for this quarter. Every incremental 100,000 portable Mac units would add ~$0.02 to EPS in FYQ2 assuming slightly lower gross margins.”

Hardly a surprise given recent trends. Recall that retail notebooks in the United States have been charting decelerating growth for months now, driven largely by the iPad. Now with RIM’s PlayBook, Hewlett-Packard’s “PalmPad” and dozens of other tablets headed to market it’s only going to slow further.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Forecast: 19 Million Notebooks Lost to Tablet Cannibalization (Meaning iPad) in 2011
• IPad: Tonight We Feast on Laptop Flesh!
• Apple: The iPad Isn’t Cannibalizing the Mac, But We Sure Hope It’s Cannibalizing the PC
• IPad No Cannibal, Says Analyst
• Apple’s iPad: Angel or Cannibal?

That is a slower start than either Android or Palm’s webOS had in their debut, NPD said. Windows Phone 7′s sales put it not only behind Android, Apple and RIM, but also behind its own, older Windows Mobile operating system. Windows Phone 7′s two percent share was roughly equal to what HP’s Palm share was for the fourth quarter.

“With its mid-quarter launch, Windows Phone 7 entered the epicenter of competition between iOS and Android at AT&T,” NPD analyst Ross Rubin said in a statement. “Both competitors offer mature feature sets and large app libraries. Microsoft has made the case for Windows Phone 7′s differentiation and improved integration. Now, the company must close the feature gap, offer more exclusive capabilities, work with partners to deliver hardware with better differentiation, and leverage its extensive experience in driving developer communities to increase its app offerings.”

Microsoft has said some two million phones running Windows Phone 7 were sold to carriers worldwide, but has offered no data on the rate at which the devices were actually leaving store shelves.

AT&T, which sells the broadest array of Windows Phone 7 models, also hasn’t given specific sales figures but said that the numbers have been growing steadily since launch. LG, one of the phone makers that built Windows 7 models, indicated its sales were less than it had hoped.

Microsoft downplayed the meaningfulness of early sales figures.

“Sales are an important measure of success, but for a new platform customer satisfaction and active developer investment can be even more important leading indicators of long-term success,” a representative said in a statement, reiterating comments that the company made last week noting high customer satisfaction numbers and a growing base of applications. “These early signs of satisfaction from customers and developers are reason to be bullish about the foundation for long-term success for Windows Phone 7.”

Overall, NPD said that Android grew its share nine points during the quarter, grabbing 53 percent of the consumer market, while Apple iPhones accounted for 19 percent of the market, down four percentage points. RIM also had a 19 percent share, a drop of two percentage points.

The five top-selling handsets included three Android models and two versions of the iPhone–the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS. The iPhone 4 was the top-selling device, followed by the Motorola Droid X and HTC Evo 4G. The iPhone 3GS was the fourth-best-selling model, followed by the Motorola Droid 2. Motorola has already said it expects to take a hit this quarter, as its top-selling devices are on Verizon, which is now getting an iPhone of its own.

The latest domestic sales data from NPD shows Apple on pace to sell between 4.1 million and 4.3 million Macs in the December quarter. Which would make for another record breaker in an ever-lengthening string of them. After all, Apple’s U.S. Mac sales are up 20 percent year-over-year for the first two months of the current quarter. And with international sales growing faster than domestic, the company will likely see between 22 percent and 28 percent year-over-year growth.

If that trend continues–and with the recent refresh of the iMac and MacBook Air lines, there’s no reason to think it won’t–2011 could end up being the “Year of the Mac” as well.