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In a conference call on Wednesday, Apple released the financial results of this yearıs fourth fiscal quarter that ended on September 25th. Participants of the conference call included Wall Street's best and brightest analysts... and me. The G4 inside Apple's new PowerMac workstations incorporates the new velocity engine that processes instruction in chunks of 128 bits rather than 64, or 32 bits. Programs like Adobe Photoshop that are optimized for the velocity engine perform at the level of supercomputers. In the first three weeks after its announcement, Apple received 150,000 advance orders for the PowerMacs. The problem came when Motorola was unable to provide enough chips to make those macs hum. This caused a delay in the shipping, a backlog of orders and meant those dollars would not be received in time to count in the fourth quarter. Apple's stock price had an owey that day and has tricked back up a little. This only means that Apple's next quarter will see blowout profits and Apple's stock is a screaming buy, lots of people thought so when the price shot up almost ten points on Thursday. It is still a bargain under 100. The new iMacs are doing great as well. After releasing them on Tuesday, October 5 Apple received over 250,000 orders in one week. The new iMacs are astounding in design and technology, and start at $999. The two higher end models have full video editing capabilities that carry with it, Apple's ease of use magic. The iMacs are air-cooled, No Fan, so they run half as quiet as any other personal computers. The CD and DVD drives are slot loading, like a car stereo. No annoying tray to worry about breaking. The sound system was all designed by Harman Kardon who will be making a sub woofer that connects to the USB port on the iMac and will cost around one hundred dollars. Apple helped design the translucent plastics and hardware design Harman Kardon's iSub. ATI's Rage 128 VR 2D/3D graphics accelerator card is standard on the iMac to make it an unbelievable gaming machine. With the optional AirPort wireless networking card($99), you can play networked games or share files wirelessly. But enough about iMacs, let's talk about Time Magazine. Coincidentally, Steve Jobs is on Time's cover this week. Standing in between two iMacs and characters from Pixar's Toy Story II, Steve Jobs looks at you as if saying "Guess who's defining modern culture?" To refresh your memory, Steve Jobs is the crazy vegan in a mock-turtle neck that founded Apple, NeXT, Pixar and then returned to Apple to make it profitable and incredibly efficient. Michael Krantz of Time follows Steve Jobs through board meetings at Pixar, sandal clad rompings through Apple and arrangements for the unveiling event for the new iMacs. Krantz shows that Jobs's detail-oriented approach is what makes success and his cultured and humanistic approach provides returns beyond the balance sheet. Not only was Jobs the Golden Boy of silicon valley in his hey-day, he retained the title even when NeXT provided disappointing sales. He is looked upon with resenting awe. He is the hot-head that people love to hate. Pirates of Silicon Valley that ran this summer on TNT showed Jobs as a demeaning egomaniac who looked likable next to Bill Gates, the nerdy thief. Most brilliant managers like Ford or Rockefeller are often studied but the best compliment to Jobs is that his madness is to mad to learn from. There is no set pattern in his tactics that could lead him to so many earth-shaking "accidents." Bob Metcalf is the Harvard PhD that invented the ethernet(and secretly the internet) at Xerox PARC before founding 3Com, he says he holds Jobs(our favorite college-dropout) in the highest regard and nothing he does could ever change that. Not all of Apple's success is due to Jobs. The New York Times ran an article stressing the influence of Apple's software engineers. Avi Tevanian is the computer genius who Jobs wooed fresh out of Carnegie Mellon University to NeXT. After passing up a job at Microsoft to work for fledgling NeXT, Avi's Apple stock options make him a very rich man. Apple's upcoming OS 9 and OS X are software marvels that the New York Times says is the cause of Apple's resurgence. The PowerPC G3 and G4 from IBM and Motorola are what makes the Mac the fastest portables and desktop machine in the world. Stevo had some help to make such a happy ending. No silly ending this week, just visit http://www.beatnikblues.com/ for archives of this column and links to pertinent info. |
