On the desktop front, where Apple saw sales plummet by 36 percent in December, Macs continued to do poorly, Baker said. "Windows desktop sales were down too, but not as much as Macs," he said.
The brightest spot in US retail sales was for what Baker dubbed "standard" PC notebooks, essentially all the laptops that don't fit in the netbook category. "Sales there were up," Baker said, and again noted that price was the driving factor.
"Nothing's doing great," said Baker, "but Apple was down a little bit more than PCs were down. That's the real story for the month."
During 2008, Apple regularly outpaced industry growth rates. In the first three months of last year, in fact, Apple's sales grew 10 times faster then the US average, according to estimates by Gartner.