By George, we think he's got it! Leave it to Steve Jobs to figure out a way to break the long-standing Apple Profit Stock Curse. See, for the seven quarters prior to Q4/1999, Apple's final earnings have been not just profits, but profits higher than the Wall Street analysts were expecting. And yet the Street's reaction to this "we're doing even better than you thought we were" news has generally been a few points knocked off of Apple's stock price. While we never understood this behavior, we were happy to document it as an honest-to-goodness repeatable syndrome and then leave it at that.

But Steve was thinking differently for Q4. Tired of seeing AAPL dip every time Apple did better than expected, yet facing an eighth consecutive Street-beating earnings report (following reduced estimates after his own earnings warning), there was only one way to break the pattern: simultaneously announce a move so absurd-- so absolutely unheard of in the computing industry-- that Wall Street would be confused into breaking its pattern. (Shades of Confuse-A-Cat, Limited.) Hence, Apple's $111 million quarterly profit was announced just as the company introduced a new line of Power Mac G4 systems which ushers in a whole new paradigm: slower computers for the same cost.

Oh, sure, you may scoff-- but you can't argue with a 14% increase in Apple's stock price. AAPL rose over nine points throughout the day in very heavy trading, finally closing at over $73 despite the company's better-than-expected profit. When you think about it, it almost makes sense, given the terrific stock performance of some of those Internet ventures whose business plans seem to be to post as large a loss as possible. (And for those of you who think Apple's stock performance is due to the analyst upgrades mentioned in a Reuters article, how's the weather over there in Fairy-Tale Land?) So congratulations to Steve both for breaking the curse, and for bringing the computing world another Apple innovation: less speed for the same price.

Unsurprisingly, we're hearing whispers that Dell soon plans to steal Apple's thunder by revamping their own line of power-user systems. After seeing Apple's stock jump 14% after unveiling slower machines that cost the same price as their predecessors, Dell hopes to take things a step further. Therefore, Dell's new Precision workstations will use much slower 486 processors running at no more than 66 MHz, with prices ranging from $2500 to $4000. Uh-oh. If Apple's going to compete with that, we hope they've got a hidden cache of 68030s kicking around in a warehouse somewhere...

Unfortunately, it appears that the Macintosh community sometimes needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future of computing. Remember the uproar over the iMac's lack of a floppy drive? Well, here we are a year and a half later, and not only is the iMac wildly successful, but Apple has also omitted the floppy drive from every computer it now produces, and there's nary a complaint still out there. And remember all the bellyaching about how SCSI was going away? And ADB? And DIN-8 serial ports? Yet these days people are happier than ever with USB and FireWire. C'mon, folks, get with the program! If Apple ditches an old paradigm and replaces it with something new, it's for your own good. All those expensive peripherals were old technology, so you should be happy to be forced to replace them.

But alas, some people just don't get it. And that's why a few customers are up in arms about the way that Apple's gone ahead and cancelled their pre-orders for the older, faster Power Mac G4 systems. Yes, hard as it is to believe, some folks are actually angry at Apple for emailing them to say that the Power Mac G4/500 they've patiently been waiting for has been replaced with a slower (but newer!) G4/450 at the same price. All orders for those old G4s have been cancelled, but customers are perfectly free to place orders for the newer, slower models instead-- and get to the back of the line.

We don't understand the problem, ourselves, but we assume it's just another instance of old-fashioned Mac users initially rejecting a new Steve innovation-- this time, the innovation of "slower computers for the same price." Still, never let it be said that Apple isn't sensitive to constant barrages of flaming e-outrage and threats of mayhem and destruction. In an attempt to placate the angry mob who's too nearsighted to see the vast far-reaching benefits of having to re-order a slower machine, MacInTouch reports that Apple is in fact reinstating the cancelled orders. Orders for G4/400 and G4/450 systems will be honored at "the original price quoted," and G4/500 orders will be replaced with "either the same configuration with a 450 MHz processor at $350 less than [the] original order price," or "any other configuration with a 450 MHz processor at the original prices in effect before October 13." So that's that. Sorry, Steve; apparently the world just wasn't ready for your latest breakthrough. Thanks for trying, though, and thanks for giving the customers what they want. (Or think they want.)

Finally, a quickie about our pals in Redmond, who are still struggling to get Windows NT 5 out the door. Renaming the product "Windows 2000" a year ago may have been just a little too prescient; the next version of Microsoft's heavy-duty professional/server operating system was most recently due on store shelves before the end of this year, but according to a PC Week article, now the company is saying that the product won't be available until February of next year. And the world reacted to the news with a deafening lack of surprise.

The most likely venue for the launch is now a Windows 2000 trade show in February. One can only imagine what'll happen if the ship date slips still further; a Windows 2000 trade show without Windows 2000 sounds like a surreal experience. But technically, Windows 2000 will ship this year; the company now plans to release the final version of the operating system to manufacturing on December 5th. It just so happens that users won't actually be able to buy Windows 2000 until it gets out of manufacturing six to eight weeks later. In other words, Windows 2000 will ship this year in much the same way that Internet Explorer is an inseparable integrated component of Windows 98. (Or, to pick an analogy closer to our heart, when Microsoft says that Windows 2000 will ship this year, it's not unlike when Steve Jobs says an Apple product is "available immediately.")

As it turns out, most Windows NT users appear not to particularly care that the OS has slipped to next year, since the "daunting" task of upgrading is prompting many customers to decide to hold off on starting until the end of next year anyway. There's also the little matter of cost; apparently some research group called Giga Information has determined that a 5,000-seat Windows NT company will have to shell out a staggering $5-8 million to upgrade, "even if an organization replaces all of its desktop hardware." So a couple more months before the product is released is just a couple more months during which customers can hock their watches and lick stamps in the evening to raise the necessary cash.