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The economy is in recession, consumer spending is down and the PC market is in the worst decline since the Great Dark Times of 2001. And Apple is doing just fine. After market close Tuesday, the company reported earnings that crushed the Street’s estimates into a fine iPod-white dust. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters estimated that Apple would earn $1.16 per share on $8.16 billion in sales. Instead, it earned $1.35 on $8.34 billion for a profit of $1.23 billion.

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The global PC market will suffer a rare decline this year with shipments expected to slip four percent to 287.3 million units in 2009, from 299.2 million in 2008. Not since the dot-com bust of 2001 have PC sales been so slow or their outlook so grim, says iSuppli, the research outfit charting the market’s collapse.

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The first half of 2009 has been brutal time for the IT sector. With consumers hesitant to buy and enterprise slashing IT budgets, world-wide information technology spending this year will decline six percent. That’s the word from Gartner, which back in March was claiming the decline would be just 3.8 percent.

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First-quarter spending on information technology goods and services was worse than Forrester Research predicted at the beginning of the year. But it will grow no worse. We’ve hit bottom. Finally. According to Forrester, anyway.

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Hewlett-Packard’s second-quarter financials may have been in line with forecasts, but they were troubling nonetheless. A number of analysts predicted that the company might report better-than-expected earnings. Sadly, it did not.

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Global information technology spending will fare worse in 2009 than it did during the dotcom bust of 2001. That’s the grim news from Gartner, which Tuesday predicted that worldwide IT spending will slip to $3.2 trillion this year from $3.4 trillion in 2008. If that should happen, the drop will be the greatest decline in IT spending in nearly a decade.

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Oracle’s ongoing pursuit of vertical markets has served it well, particularly in these recessionary times–as its latest earnings prove. No surprise then to see the company bolstering its presence in the health care market with yet another acquisition–its 50th since 2005.

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With the Dow near its lowest point in a decade and global PC shipments down for the first time since 2002, according to market research firm IDC, Hewlett-Packard reported fiscal first-quarter earnings today, and though they met Wall Street’s expectations, they were clearly not what the market had been hoping for.

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Yahoo’s financials for the fourth quarter–co-founder Jerry Yang’s last as CEO–were about what you’d expect: mediocre. The fourth was Yahoo’s first money-losing quarter since 2002, and the first time its revenue declined since the fourth quarter of 2001.

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Goldman Sachs published its “Americas: 2009 Software Outlook” report today and it’s as dismal and ugly a forecast as you’d expect, given the current economic climate.

Of course, as ugly as it was, it could have been worse.

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As bad as predictions are for global IT spending during the next year, they’re not nearly as bad as what the industry experienced between 2001 and 2003. So when the Semiconductor Industry Association says worldwide sales of semiconductors declined more steeply in November than in October, well, we’ve seen worse, right?

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Apple may not have yet succumbed to the economic malaise that hangs heavy over consumer tech, but it will soon. According to Goldman Sachs, anyway. This morning Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey downgraded Apple’s stock to neutral from a buy, claiming the company will suffer when consumers continue to rein in spending next year. Worse, it won’t uncrate a magical new product category at Macworld.

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With the econalypse still playing havoc with global finances, holiday shoppers are behaving pretty much as you’d imagine. They’re spending less–presumably, saving up for that awful rainy day when discretionary income is better spent holding onto their homes than on another Wii game under the Christmas tree.

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