Most of you remember the truly dark days a few years ago, when Apple was making some serious managerial missteps and market share continued to dwindle. Even as a couple of billion dollars' worth of red ink gushed from Cupertino like the torrent of blood pouring out of the elevator in The Shining, die-hard Mac fans continually tried to find reasons to counter the pressure to jump the sinking Apple ship and swim over to that ocean liner with all the Windows. One of the rationalizations we remember getting batted around at that time was that Apple wasn't in any real danger of sinking-- they still had a ton of cash in the bank, and-- this was the kicker-- Apple was still listed higher in the Fortune 500 than Microsoft was. Not only was that spurious reasoning, but it didn't remain true for very long; right now, for instance, Microsoft is at 137, while Apple lags at 223.

And yet, even though we never really liked bringing those kinds of rankings into the already irrational and muddled platform wars, we feel we just have to mention a financial ranking in which Apple actually beats Microsoft. MacCentral reports that Barron's, one of the big players in the business news world, has just compiled their own "top 500 company rankings." As opposed to Fortune's ranking methodology, which we believe only takes company revenues into account, Barron's approach combines revenues with total return and return on investment numbers, since today even "a company without any earnings can still have a rapidly rising stock price." So Barron's crunched all their numbers, and when the dust settled, Apple was actually ranked fifth. According to a CNET article, Microsoft grabbed fourteenth place, just ahead of Sun.

So there you have it; it all depends on just which numbers you're examining. Incidentally, Apple shouldn't feel too smug about their top-one-percent slot... If Steve Jobs has a white whale, we think it's got to be Dell, probably because of Michael Dell's infamous remarks about a year and a half ago. (For those with short memory spans, when asked what he'd do if he were running Apple, he replied that he'd shut it down and give the money back to the stockholders.) Ever since then, it's seemed like Apple's been comparing itself to Dell-- creating an online build-to-order store like Dell, beating Dell's inventory level, etc. Well, now Steve has something else to shoot for: Dell holds the number-two slot in the Barron's 500. How much do you want to bet Steve's scheming ways to beat them out in next year's list?

As the year 2000 approaches, we find ourselves increasingly open to the idea that the world is coming to an end. We're typically pretty skeptical of all the "End Is Nigh" rhetoric, but sometimes you just can't ignore the signs. Our anxiety about the end of the world has been rising steadily over the past year, as Apple managed to generate a sustainable profit, crank out an effective advertising campaign, produce the best-selling computer in the consumer market, and demonstrate year-over-year growth. Those are all some scary indicators. But this whole "we want to be the best games platform" thing really gives us a wiggins.

Not that we don't like games-- we do. In fact, we love them. It's just that, traditionally, Apple has myopically tried to stifle games development on the Mac platform, in fear that good games would only reinforce the attitude that the Mac is only a toy. These days, however, the new Apple is welcoming games developers with open arms, and making such game-friendly moves as announcing support for the industry standard OpenGL 3D programming interface and putting 3D hardware acceleration in every Macintosh made. That's spooky. But we didn't start stockpiling canned goods and bottled water until we heard about Apple's presence at the cross-platform Game Developers Conference. It wasn't just that they went at all-- though that alone is certainly enough to give longtime Mac watchers the heebie-jeebies. No, it's the fact that even Mac haters at the conference were starting to warm up to Apple's hardware. Time to move into the fallout shelter.

The Mac Gamer's Ledge notes a frightening phenomenon; the heavily PC-biased Game Wire's report from the conference includes comments from two correspondents who remark upon Apple's presence. One guy notes that the "icebox" G3 was "the biggest hyped product in the computer show," and while he concedes that the G3 might beat out a Pentium II system in some tests, he "seriously doubts" it could trounce any "heavily equipped PC systems out there." Okay, not the biggest compliment in the world, but at least it's an acknowledgement that Apple was in full hype mode at the conference. Then the other correspondent, an admitted "Mac hater," truly confirms that the world is coming to an end by stating that he or she is "really impressed with the speed and graphic quality" of the new G3's, which "were EVERYWHERE... by the time [he or she] got home everything looked iMac blue." Now that's a strong show presence-- and at a games conference! Duck and cover!

We knew it seemed too good to be true. Given that this summer's MacWorld Expo got moved from our own home in Boston to the Big Apple, we look forward once again to trying to produce AtAT from the decidedly un-TV-studio-like environs of a cheap hotel room. That challenge alone isn't necessarily a big deal, provided one has the hardware to make the process go smoothly. Unfortunately, AtAT's mobile unit consists of a PowerBook Duo 280c, which we love-- but which is really better suited to keeping in touch via email and playing some basic games than it is to producing the daily content that you all know and love. It lacks the RAM, stability, modem speed, and screen real estate (especially screen real estate) that make the production of AtAT a fun and rewarding project. That's why we were so jazzed to hear that Apple's new consumer portable, code-named "P1," might be shipping as early as late April. Plenty of time to pick one up, configure it to our liking, and work out any quirks before we piled into the AtATmobile and drove to New York for the big show this July.

But that "late April" rumor always sounded a bit fishy to us, and now Mac OS Rumors is throwing some new info into the mix, stating that Apple may be releasing its new professional PowerBook at that time instead. Apparently the new pro model, code-named "Lombard," is closer to completion than the P1 is, and the P1's release may now have been bumped back to our originally-predicted MacWorld Expo time frame, according to O'Grady's PowerPage. Which is a big ol' bummer for us, because it means that we'll be Duo-ing it again, unless perhaps P1's are available on the show floor during the Expo itself. We don't particularly want to sink any more money into this Duo, since the P1 is just around the corner, so we figure we'll just tough it out.

As for the option of picking up a cheap PowerBook G3 Series or a spankin' new Lombard instead, well, we've considered it. But one of the things we absolutely love about our antiquated Duo is its teensiness-- it's both small and light. The G3 Series is a behemoth by comparison, and we're also holding out hope that rumors of the P1's super-long battery life will come true. (Plus, we want our next laptop to be purple.) Leave it to Apple to release a consumer laptop that fits our professional needs better than their professional system does-- which is more a function of our decidedly unusual "professional needs" than any kind of miscalculation on Apple's part. In the meantime, perhaps we'll paint our Duo a lovely shade of Grape...