Amazing how you don't hear much about Apple Computer these days. Hang on a minute - before the Mac fanatics (and some of my best friends are) start writing stroppy e-mails about iMacs and iBooks and yet-another-profitable-quarter, let me clarify. I mean this in the best possible sense.
Apple-bashing used to be a regular and grim event. As yet another chief executive fled, as the company bled more disillusioned engineering talent, as the usual news item ran in the international media about (yet again) the surplus of desktop systems and the acute shortage of Apple's always-popular laptops, even Mac fans were driven to snide comments and often, to Windows/Intel PCs.
Journalists who covered Apple referred to this particular beat as "the Apple deathwatch". We all were waiting for the death rattle, the last gasp of a once-great company. Few wanted to see Apple go, since the company was the first - and, except perhaps for Sony and its slim little Vaio laptop, still the only - computer manufacturer with style.
Apple also offered the only real consumer alternative to an all-Windows world, and even hardened Apple-haters admitted the company was, for this purpose, the only significant competition in town. And Apple made the computing industry interesting, if only because its woes and tribulations had turned it into a kind of tragic opera - if, alarmingly, the sort where characters die onstage but take forever to kick the bucket and meanwhile keep on singing, and singing, and ) singing.
But look at Apple now - it's gone from a virtual corpse to a trendy cyber-youth, drinking fruit smoothies and grooving to MP3s. Co-founder Steve Jobs is back at the wheel and - amazingly for a man who is himself a drama magnet - has put the focus back on products and away from company trauma.
Apple posted first-quarter profits of $183 million (€191 million) this year. Its stylish iBook laptop was the leading portable in the US market for the fourth quarter of last year, while Apple led strongly in the education market, too, with a 30.6 per cent share in the fourth quarter. Investors are very happy (especially those who bought shares when they'd completely tanked in the mid-1990s).
It has taken about two years for the company's fortunes to reverse and speculation to settle, but now Apple gets relatively normal press coverage.
It's almost not even particularly interesting to cover the company anymore, except to note new product releases or the occasional court case against iMac clone manufacturers. The end of an era, certainly, but in this case, that's not a bad thing at all.
The best website of the week award (and maybe, the Tilting At Windmills award as well) has to go to Save Our Satellites, http://www.saveiridium.com/. This crowd says it wants to rescue the 66 satellites bankrupt telecommunications company Iridium has up in orbit, and convert them to a "global open source satellite network" project, which could become "the greatest experiment in human engineering".
Iridium has been high in tech news for the past two weeks as the company has tried and failed to find a buyer. The firm had once hoped to create an accessible-anywhere mobile phone system but - in a cautionary tale for all the over-hyped dot.com projects out there - the world moved on, mobile telephony became cheaper, handsets smaller, and only 55,000 people felt compelled to carry the clunky phones and pay the very high costs associated with the Iridium project.
Now it looks like the company will have to pull its 66 satellites (or "birds", in telecoms parlance) from orbit, allowing them to go through meltdown as they reenter Earth's atmosphere. Or maybe not, if SOS can pull this one off.
They say they are serious, and hope to get "scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and people like you" involved.
At the moment they hope to raise the roughly $600 million purchase price by getting people to sign up for Iridium credit cards (a share of purchases would go to SOS) and, by selling Tshirts. They are even soliciting Tshirt ideas at the website. As a matter of fact, they seem quite obsessed by the T-shirt idea. They must be authentic Silicon Valley programmers then.
FOLLOWING on the heels of its announcement about its new games console, the X-Box, Microsoft this week revealed the latest version of its Internet video and audio player software, Windows Media Player 7. The product is Microsoft's attempt to take on dominant rival RealNetworks' RealPlayer, which has about 80 per cent of the market.
And as with the X-Box, Microsoft was previewing a product which won't be available for some time - in this case, the end of the year, conveniently allowing content creators plenty of time to think about producing for the Microsoft format. Windows Media Player 7 also is being hyped as a single player which will pull together multiple functions and formats, eliminating the need for lots of pesky downloads of various players and software gizmos.
Unfortunately, most people will still have to attempt at least one other download - RealPlayer. Windows Media Player 7 won't play audio and video that uses the RealNetworks format. Oh, well. Let the battle of the media players begin.
klillington@irish-times.ie
