Briefly: MWSF attendance, Apple notebook sales, Panther update, iPhoto

Attendance at IDG's Macworld San Francisco scored the most visitors even in its history this year, while WR Hambrecht began its coverage on Apple with an optimistic look. Meanwhile, a market study showed Apple at 10 percent of notebooks in January, and the company itself launched updates for iPhoto 6 and Panther.

Record Macworld attendance

Macworld San Francisco host IDG on Tuesday announced that attendance at the 2007 show was far and away the best ever recorded, at 45,572 visitors over the five days of the event. This topped last year's show by 19 percent.

The firm attributed the success in part to the expansion of the show, which branched into the North Hall with new interactive exhibits. Macworld's instructional program was also the best in the show's 23-year history, IDG said.

The conference was also likely helped by the simultaneous introductions of the Apple TV and the iPhone.

WR Hambrecht pulls trigger on Apple stock

WR Hambrecht late last week became the latest financial research group to tip its hand on Apple Inc. stock, starting its coverage with a "buy" rating and an aggressive $110 price target.

The judgment was based largely on Apple's expansion outside of its familiar turf with the Apple TV and iPhone, which WR Hambrecht analyst Matthew Kather said would turn Apple into a "consumer electronics powerhouse." The Mac maker's growth in computer sales was also well above the industry average, Kather noted.

Particularly impressive for the expert was Apple's notebook sales tally, which soared 49.3 percent in 2006 versus the year before and gave the company's MacBooks a 7.1 percent foothold in the US market.

NPD January figures put Apple in fifth for retail notebooks

Research firm NPD published results on Tuesday that showed Apple as the fifth best in notebook sales at US retail stores, capturing 10.1 percent of the overall unit share. It was not present in the top five for desktops.

Hewlett-Packard led the sales charge for the first month of 2007, picking up 23.5 percent of notebooks and 43.2 percent of desktops.

As expected, Apple also continued to hold 72.7 percent of music player sales with its iPod line, beating second-place challenger SanDisk, which held 8.9 percent. Newcomer Microsoft was third with 3.2 percent of the market for its Zune player.

Apple releases Panther security, iPhoto updates

To match its 10.4.9 update for Tiger users, Apple on Tuesday followed suit with security patches for users still running Mac OS X Panther.

Security Update 2007-003 for OS X 10.3.9 Client (36MB) and 10.3.9 Server (49.5MB) are both recommended for all users and plug numerous vulnerabilities in the earlier OS, including those for ColorSync, CoreGraphics, the Flash plug-in, OpenSSH, and QuickDraw. Either update is virtually identical to each other save for the servermgrd fix in the Server edition.

Apple also issued a minor fix for iPhoto users. The 8MB 6.0.6 update touches on problems with EXIF data compatibility and Photocasting.