Here are your Apple rumors and news items for Thursday:

Third Place: Taking the bronze medal is no bad thing when it comes to the PC market, especially with regard to Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL). As quarterly reports from research firms IDC and Gartner both showed, while worldwide shipments are up more than 2%, the U.S. market actually shrank between 4%-6% over the second quarter. Unsurprisingly, Gartner unsurprisingly singled out Apple’s iPad as one of the major factors in the U.S. decline. Even with lower PC and notebook sales overall though, Apple reportedly had a great quarter, taking an almost 11% share of the market according to Gartner. IDC places Apple’s share
even higher at close to 15%. Apple is now just behind Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) and Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) in PC sales in the U.S., thanks to the popularity of the MacBook Air and the company’s other models.

$9 Billion China Deal: The news that China Telecom (NYSE:CHA) will partner with Apple in China come November means that there may be as many as 106 million new iPhone users before the year is out. Speaking with Apple Insider, Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White said that the China Telecom deal could equate to $9 billion in revenue for Apple going forward.

Spotify to iPhone:  The Swedish cloud-based Internet radio service Spotify finally arrived on Thursday. Consumers who receive an invitation from the service can go to Apple’s app store and download the Spotify app and choose from multiple subscription plans to the service, the most expensive of which is $10 a month. Spotify’s business model is not dissimilar to Pandora’s
(NYSE:P), a company that is struggling to find a strong paying audience on mobile devices.

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.