Apple's website was popular in May

EVER WILLING to cast Apple in a good light, the Cappuccino friendly press decided that news that Apple's web site had more than 55.7 million unique visitors in May was an opportunity to plug the Iphone 3GS.

Figures from Nielson online do not give details of what people visited at the Apple site, however CNET could not resist the urge to claim that the reason so many people had visited the Apple site was all to do with the shiny new Iphone.

Certainly the figures were more than double that of second-ranked Hewlett-Packard, which drew in 21.9 million people.

Nielson said May visitors to Apple's Web site spent an average of an hour and 14 minutes on it, "perhaps in anticipation of the pending release of the new iPhone".

Now to our mind either Apple owners are slow readers whose fingers are leaving smears on their screens as they read, or something else is happening here.

The fact that Itunes and the Apple application store both run off the main Apple site might mean that more visitors show up there than at a traditional hardware site, and that could have something to do with the high traffic volume. Certainly that's more likely than pre-buzz about a product.

Traffic to Dell's site came in third place, with 16.8 million unique visitors in May. Overall, website visitors to the hardware manufacturers followed by Nielsen grew 22 percent year over year, from 57.3 million in May 2008 to 70.1 million in May of this year. µ