Apple’s market share is constantly growing and is now at 8%, according to the latest estimates provided by Hitslink.com.

The company that came up with the MacBook and also gave us the iPod and the iPhone is now at 8 percent market share if we are to believe Hitslink’s latest charts. What is really “impressive” in the research firm’s opinion is the Apple’s performance in the last two days of 2007: for that short period Mac users (all lines) accounted for 8.1% of all the visitors browsing the 40,000+ sites monitored by Hitslink, while iPhone users accounted for 0.17%. For December as a whole, Mac users accounted for 7.31% (compared to 6.80% in November) of all visits, while iPhone users were at 0.12% (compared to .09% in November). That means that Apple's market share rose 7.5% for the Mac and 33% for the iPhone in a single month.

Hitslink calls the evolution “phenomenal” and underlines that the wonder-gadget called iPhone has seen significant increases in popularity in areas where it has been launched recently (particularly in France and the UK, where it has 0.10%, 0.11% market share respectively). For the United States alone, the iPhone has reached an outstanding 0.27% market share of web browsing in less than 7 months.

“Another interesting aspect of this data is that these numbers do not include visitors using Windows on Mac hardware via Boot Camp or other program.  Therefore, these numbers actually understate the market share for the Mac. We have no way of telling by how much, however,” said Hitslink.

While the evolution is very impressive, Apple’s install base is still quite small compared to that of Microsoft. In June last year, Steve Ballmer boasted with an install base of more than 60 million licensees for Windows Vista and announced that by the end of FY 2008 there will be more than 1 billion PCs running Windows.

However, Apple is no longer playing catching-up with its “former” Redmond rival. In the digital music industry Apple is by far the dominant force (while Microsoft is just a new-comer) and the Cupertino, CA-based giant is also making waves in the very lucrative, but also highly-competitive mobile domain, with its touch-screen smartphone. Apple is currently valued at more than $170 billion and (coincidence or not) has witnessed an opening of $200 per share on December 28. Since the iPhone was introduced June 29, Apple’s shares have gained 62.3 percent.

Even the US Army is “powerless” in front of the Mac-attack.