Although Dell is the clear winner in PC sales, Apple has "something Dell covets: dominance in the digital-music-player business. And it's likely to stay that way for a while longer. Last October, Dell launched a hard-drive-based digital-music jukebox aimed squarely at the apple of Jobs's eye -- his best-selling iPod hard-drive digital (HDD) music player. The Dell DJ player undercut the iPod slightly on price. Reviewers generally liked it, calling it 'the iPod killer.'" The BusinessWeek article notes that new "refreshed" models may be on the horizon to help spur sales during the holiday season and that a significant percentage of customers who are buying the DJs are first-time customers to Dell.

The iPod had an 82 percent share of the market in U.S. retail stores in the 12 months ended in August, up from 64 percent in the same period a year earlier, and 33 percent two years ago, according to Port Washington, New York-based NPD Group Inc.

Sales of players that use computer hard disks as storage, like the iPod, will increase almost fivefold to 10.4 million units this year from 2.1 million in 2003, according to In- Stat/MDR, a market researcher based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Devices that play MP3 digital music files will surge to 52.4 million units by 2007, up from about 18 million this year, In- Stat/MDR said.