Friday’s Apple Rumors: HP in the Rearview

Here are your Apple rumors and news items for Friday:

Leader of the Pack: A Friday report at DigiTimes (via Apple Insider) claims that Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is poised to overtake Hewlett-Packard (NASDAQ: HPQ) as the largest notebook PC maker in the world by 2012. Of course, the victory is a matter of perspective. Apple is poised to overtake the world’s leading PC manufacturer only because of the runaway success of the iPad. The popular tablet sometimes is classified as a notebook PC by the industry and analysts, and sometimes it’s not. The report says Apple is expected to ship a total of 60 million iPads in 2012, alongside 15 million MacBook latptops. A total 75 million mobile PCs in the market would give Apple a nearly 30% share of the global market. Meanwhile, HP is expected to ship a maximum of 56 million mobile PCs ��including notebooks, netbooks and tablets ��this year.

Light Lobbying: Apple, like every major industrial force, spent a good deal of money lobbying the U.S. government during the first quarter of 2011. The Cupertino, Calif., company used its money to lobby for an open Internet, green technology, education technology development, corporate tax reform and patent reform, among other causes. It did not, relatively speaking, spend a whole lot, though. According to a Thursday Reuters report, Apple spent $560,000 on lobbying during the first quarter ��the exact same amount they spent during the same period in 2010. What’s surprising is this sum represents a fraction of that spent by its competitors. Both Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) spent about three times that amount on lobbying across the first months of 2011.

$150 Per User: Asymco analyst Horace Dediu has gotten to the bottom of just how much Apple makes off of its freakishly loyal iPhone and iPad users. According to a Friday report at TUAW, the answer is about $150 per year. That is the amount of revenue Apple makes off of each user of an iOS device like those listed above. With 180 million people using 200 million devices with access to the App Store, Apple is raking in the dough. Dediu projects that, by the time Apple has 500 million users on the iOS platform, it will be making $74 billion annually from secondary sales on the platform.

As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at�@ajohnagnello and�become a fan of�InvestorPlace on Facebook.