Apple Macintosh turns 20: What a yawn

ALLEGEDLY, there is some sort of newsworthiness to the Apple Macintosh's 20th Anniversary. You can go to the Apple web site and view the original hair-raising TV commercial here, complete with the war-hammer slinging chick, stimulating music, and IBM-as-Orwell imagery. Of course, there's no mention of the Apple //, but...

After twenty years, Apple retains its whole three to five per cent of market share of die-hard cultists, with a mindshare footprint out of proportion to the rest of the world due to its infiltration into the reporting and entertainment worlds. If Apple was smart, it would compile a list of all the movies and TV shows it has shown up in over the years, then add to it the number of print columnists that are in its thrall.

Apple reminds me a lot of Danish A/V and telecom company Bang & Olufsen. B&O makes beautiful products where design is the starting point for product implementation, driving engineering and manufacturing. For B&O, it's all about lifestyle, a mantra that the Apple people have subliminally embraced as they tout the beauty of their iMacs, iPods, and Powerbooks.

Unlike B&O, Apple tends to get occasional fits of "pennywise and pound foolish," tending not to think things through when it comes to product lifecycle, the iPod battery mutiny being the latest faux pas in the company's history. Makes as much sense as an original Macintosh with a whole 128K of memory. An original sealed case, soldered to the motherboard, no RAM sockets 128K. No wonder that "the rest of us" flocked to what ultimately would be described today as open standards hardware. If you want to upgrade and customize your computer, PC hardware has been the place to be from simple RAM and card upgrades to build-it-yourself mods with glowing cases. Sealed case designs a la iMac make lots more sense today than they did 20 years ago.

And for all the hype and hoopla surrounding the Mac, today Apple puts the iPod family and iLife software as the leading products on their home page. The company that once pumped hype over its operating system integrated with good looking hardware is now peddling applications. Sure, GarageBand and the rest of the iLife software are nice, but it leaves Apple selling nickels and dimes (well $49 per user) to a locked-in customer base. About the most innovative "feature" that I doubt Microsoft will bother to copy is the iLife Family pack, basically a home site license for $79 bucks to cover up to five Macs. Redmond wants to maximize gouge, er, cash flow.

Don't get me wrong, Jobs and Company are on the right track with the PC-as-digital-hub concept, but Apple is faced with having to write Microsoft XP applications at the end of the day if it intends to make a few more bucks beyond its core 3-5% base. It will be interesting to see how well Apple and HP play together as HP remarkets iTunes and builds its own iPod. It makes me wonder if HP could ever end up building Macs somewhere down the road? A strange idea, perhaps, but it's also one worth watching. HP has a dedication to engineering quality and has shown it isn't afraid to take risks in recent years. And 20 years of 3-5% market share may have mellowed Steve and current Apple corporate enough to consider licensing out (again) the Mac hardware design. µ