"Apples have been associated with ruin ever since Biblical times, when a prized example of the fruit was behind mankind's expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

"More recently, the Apple of the corporate variety has been raised as an enemy of the music industry. First it launched iTunes software, which was promoted as allowing consumers to 'rip, mix and burn' their own CDs, so avoiding the need to visit music stores.

"Then has come the iPod, which allows high-quality, transportable consumption of those tracks downloaded from legal, and illegal, song-swapping or 'shareware' sites.

"More than 800,000 iPods were sold in the first three months of the year, more than in the last quarter of 2003, when the digital music player was seen as the must-buy Christmas gift.

"Signally for Apple, more iPods were sold in the latest quarter than Apple Macintosh computers, a fact which illustrates not just the success of the digital device but the vulnerability of the company without it.

"In the last quarter of 1999, the company sold 1.35 million Macintosh pcs or, as Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive boasted, 'one Mac every six seconds'. The number sold in the most recent quarter was little more than half that number, although still up 5 per cent year on year.

"What Apple has found in the iPod is a way to escape the fierce competition besetting the computer market, as evident in the merger between Hewlett-Packard and Dell and, earlier this month, the loss of 2,500 jobs at Gateway, the American pc manufacturer and retailer.

"However, Apple's own history, and its loss of prominence to Microsoft in the computer market in the 1980s, shows how quickly product leads can be eroded.

"Apple is only as good as its next product, which companies such as EMI and BMG must hope has nothing at all to do with copying music."