Who says Apple never listens to its customers? Okay, sure, sometimes things have to get ugly before they start paying attention, but when they make a particularly boneheaded move, it seems like these days they're much more likely to admit the mistake and make amends. Remember last year's fracas when they revamped the QuickTime 3 licensing terms? They eventually changed things around after massive developer protest. And more recently, they modified their public source license in response to feedback from the Open Source community. If you want to look larger, you could even consider the whole Carbon API thingy to be a response to developer reluctance to port to Yellow Box. Apple does listen-- at least, better than they once did.

The latest case in point? AppleShare IP. By now you're probably privy to the outrage following Apple's announcement that version 6.2 of the excellent cross-platform file-, web-, email-, and print-serving software suite would cost people $499-- even though it was primarily a bug-fix upgrade. What ensued was basically the online equivalent of the villagers grabbing lots of torches, pitchforks, and those rake-things from the old Frankenstein movies and storming the castle. It was not a pretty sight.

So we were happy to see that last night, Apple officially posted the ASIP 6.2 updater as a free, 20 MB download for owners of any previous ASIP 6.x version. They "done right" by the user community, and faithful viewer Todd Wheeler forwarded us an excerpt from the email sent by Apple's marketing veep Phil Schiller to the ASIP mailing list: "...We have received strong feedback from a number of our loyal AppleShare IP 6 customers about the need to provide this latest release of AppleShare IP to them at a more affordable price than the $499 upgrade that has been announced. They are absolutely right... Apple's customers are considered by many to be the most loyal and passionate in the industry. We love to listen to them, learn from them, and respond quickly when they provide advice..." So there you have it: another victory for everyone involved. Aren't happy endings great?

Uh-oh-- you may want to prepare for a rocky kick-off to the whole iMac era at Sears. Following early reports that iMacs had already surfaced in a couple of Sears stores, your AtAT crew took a trip down to the local mall to see what was up. We took the escalator up to the home electronics department, and there it was: a beautiful Blueberry iMac, resplendent among the throngs of dull beige boxes. It was the first thing we saw as we got off the escalator, since it was set up right at the end of the aisle, and we were therefore pleased that it got such prime real estate in the computer department. So far so good.

But when we approached the machine, we saw that all it displayed onscreen was the Finder's desktop. There were no demos running, or even loaded; this appeared to be a stock iMac pulled from the box, plugged in, turned on, set up, and left at the Finder. We tried to make the system a little more engaging by firing up Nanosaur and leaving it at the animated splash screen, which features a nifty 3D dinosaur running through the mist as jungle-drum-type music plays in the background. We also noticed a total lack of any marketing materials or product literature-- it was just the iMac, standing alone. We're pretty confident, though, that the marketing situation will change starting this weekend.

However, we're not very confident about we consider to be the biggest problem with this whole Sears scenario: the iMac was listed at $1299. For those of you keeping score at home, that's a full hundred bucks higher than Apple's own list price. We've really got to wonder about the wisdom of putting iMacs in 800 consumer-oriented department stores all across the country and then trying to sell them at a higher price than anywhere else. So is it just a mistake, or is Sears really planning to keep iMacs at the $1299 price point? Presumably we'll know after this weekend's big kickoff.

As much as we love following the day-to-day drama of Apple Computer, we can't help but feel that recently things just haven't been nearly as surreal as we'd like. There haven't been as many bizarre occurrences to stop us in our tracks and make us go, "Huh." That's good for the stockholders and for the continued financial health of the company, sure, but still, we miss the weird stuff. Heck, we thrive on it.

That's why we're so indebted to a longtime faithful viewer mysteriously known only as "~" for contacting us with one of the strangest stories we've yet encountered involving Apple. Some of you will remember that a few weeks ago, we were bemoaning the rather limited choice of programming available via QuickTime 4's new live streaming architecture: HBO previews, BBC world news, WGBH public television, and Bloomberg financial news. That's why "~" notified us that, ever since his update to the latest beta version of QuickTime 4, his bookmarked Bloomberg webcast turned into something quite different. Specifically, when he fired it up in QiuckTime Player, he found he was watching an episode of Star Trek: Voyager on UPN.

So, yeah, that was weird-- but it got even more interesting. Not long after, "~" wrote back to tell us that now his supposed "Bloomberg" webcast was showing the season finale of The X-Files on a San Francisco Fox station. He even emailed us his Bloomberg QuickTime file, so we could see for ourselves-- and yes, it was true. Then things wandered into the realm of the truly surreal: after The X-Files ended, a short portion of the San Francisco news was shown, and then the screen went black-- and we heard an audio-only track of the "Swedish-made penis enlarger" scene from the original Austin Powers repeated over and over again for perhaps ten minutes. We swear we are not making this up. After that, Voyager started again. This lineup just keeps repeating. Yes, we know this sounds kinda nuts, but we've posted the QuickTime 4 file which points to this mysterious live video stream so you can check it out yourself-- hurry, because there's no telling how long it'll stay up. We've opened up the file and confirmed that the stream is in fact coming from Apple's servers-- you can even enter the URL rtsp://qt4s.apple.com/bloomberg/bloomberghi in QuickTime Player to load the same stream. (Loading a Bloomberg stream from Apple's site, however, gives you the actual Bloomberg broadcast.) All we can say is, it's good to see that someone at Apple still has a sense of humor.