Rival bestseller lists: Apples vs. netbooks

    By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

    Here’s a tale of two demographics.

    If you list the five bestsellers in Amazon’s “Computers and PC Hardware” category today, you get five netbooks — three ASUS Eees and two ACER Aspire Ones. That’s been the story pretty much all year.

    If you list the five most popular items in “Computers and Software” on American Express’s shopAmex site, you get four Apple (AAPL) products — three MacBooks, one Apple TV and one Sony (SNE) Blu-Ray player.

    The first non Apple computer on the AMEX site is No. 17, a Dell (DELL) Inspiron. The first Apple on the Amazon list is No. 14, a white MacBook.

    Why the difference? The Amazon site is open to everyone and tends to attract bargain hunters. The AMEX site is open only to card members, and although it advertises 30% discounts, it’s attracting a different sort of clientele — one that doesn’t seem to be put off by Apple’s premium pricing.