Apple Archive

"Gunningham's departure dredges up lingering questions. Can Apple ever escape its desktop perch and march into the data centers of America Inc.? And what does Apple have to show for the past two years of efforts to sell powerful servers to businesses?" Alex Salkever is wondering for eCommerceTimes.

"Our main goal is to complete the Rhapsody OS and make it an OS that people would like to use. We aim for end users and hope to bring them what Apple has brought their customers for the past 20 years - the simplicity and style which Mac OS has." Check out the project here.

An internal Apple memo has been posted that states that Apple has just paid off its remaining $300 million in debt and is now debt-free. This concludes an amazing journey that has taken the company from a debt of $1 billion in Apple's darkest days to the current cash reserves of $4.8 billion.

Apple Computer is possibly in a better shape than it has been in for a long while. With the second coming of Steve Jobs and the renewed focus on innovation, Apple scrambled back from the brink to a relatively healthy company. The question is how will Apple ensure its position, if not strengthen it going forward?

Macintosh market share continues to decline, but the iPod and iTunes are hit products. Where does Apple Computer’s future lie? An interview with HBS professor David Yoffie.

Exclusive Sebastian Gunningham, the high-profile executive wooed to lead Apple's enterprise sales division, has left the company, Think Secret has learned. Gunningham's hiring was considered a sign that Apple was serious about taking on corporate markets, and his departure raises questions about Apple's success in future enterprise sales.

If you take Apple at its word, the company has no long-term strategy of aiming its products beyond its traditional markets. That message was repeated every which way I posed the question to Jon Rubinstein, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, when we sat down at the 2004 Macworld. In the context of an Xserve road map, I asked Rubinstein whether Apple built products with a target audience in mind. The answer was no. “It was our customers who asked us to build these products,” Rubinstein said. It seems video editors in particular wanted more performance, he added.

Steve Jobs says analysts should stop worrying about market share and focus on profits. And moving the company beyond Macs could boost both. Yet Apple's market share has slipped inexorably. It dropped from 9.4% in 1993 to just 3% in 1997, the year Jobs was rehired to run the company. According to Gartner's preliminary market-share data, Apple held just 1.8% of the worldwide PC market in the fourth quarter of 2003. And some think Apple's share will fall further, if it can't keep pace with surging overall PC demand. In the meantime, the Street yawned when Jobs & Co. recently reported strong results, citing slack sales of the new G5 and ignoring plenty of good news.

As the Mac marks its 20th year, the iPod may define the company's new era of an open strategy.

"For us, all of a sudden, music is the No. 1 priority of the company," Rob Schoeben, Apple's vice president of applications marketing, told Reuters. "We're trying to be a part of the music evolution overall" he said. Our Take: I wonder where that leaves Apple's Mac OS X. While Apple always was and remains a hardware company, MacOS was always at the core of the whole deal. Is the Mac OS X and Macs of the future going to serve merely as the platform to do the "music stuff that sell" instead of being the main focus of the product line? This reminds me a whole lot of Be, Inc.'s focus shift to Internet Appliances and the grandual demise of BeOS.

(Note: First published in the Mercury News in January, 1984): "When Apple Computer Inc. rolls out its Macintosh computer on Jan. 24, the company's self-proclaimed ``pirates'' will have delivered their treasure. Since 1981, when Macintosh took form in an internal memo, Apple founder Steve Jobs, now 28, has led a maverick clan of programmers and designers on a mission to prove that the success of the Apple II was not a fluke."

This month is the 20th anniversary of Apple Computer's Macintosh. To mark the occasion, Wired News is running several stories this week about the groundbreaking machine, the people who created it and the Mac's impact on computing and culture in general.

As of this writing Steve Jobs' keynote is taking place, he has already announced a new Final Cut version, a new XServe, a new MS Office for Mac, iTunes and iLife 04, GarageBand, iPod Mini and more. View the keynote live or go to MacMinute for up to the minute updates.

We've all heard about the iPod lawsuits and the recent 15" Powerbook issue, but it's not the only apple related lawsuit brewing. Apple's iBook appears to have a little issue.