There's no question that Steve Jobs has worked some real magic with Apple. Only about two years ago the company's stock price was in the gutter (assuming you can find twelve dollars in the gutter), Apple's idea of a home computer was the (shudder) Performa series, and following the loss of a billion dollars in a year, many people thought the term "beleaguered" was a compliment. "Three seconds from a horrible imploding death" might have been a more accurate description. Now, though, even despite supply problems that seem to plague Apple no matter how well things are going, the company's got a butt-kicking product line, a stock price hovering near its all-time high, a solid reputation with the press, a slew of commercials in heavy rotation, and market share on the rise. And while all that obviously isn't due to the work of just one man, we doubt anyone will deny that Apple's comeback couldn't have happened without him.

The only problem is, Steve doesn't just run Apple-- he's got another company too. For those of you who may have forgotten, Steve's little movie house is called Pixar, and it's cranked out a couple of modest successes called Toy Story and A Bug's Life. And, possibly due in part to Steve spending so much time over at Apple, there are some who point to Pixar's recent performance and are toying with the "beleaguered" tag, too. Pixar has had a tough time in recent quarters; last July they announced that video sales of A Bug's Life were much slower than expected, and we seem to recall some lower-than-expected earnings reports in there somewhere, as well.

But fear not! The mere presence of The Steve appears to be righting wrongs and restoring the balance of goodness. Pixar's just announced their third quarter's financial results, and the sun is shining and the birds are singing: Pixar pulled in $79.2 million, up from just $2.5 million in the same quarter a year ago. In terms of sheer profit, Pixar made $32.3 million, or 63 cents a share-- which, according to a CBS MarketWatch report, pretty much blew away the analysts' prediction of 29 cents a share. Chalk up another win for Steve's Mighty Street-Beating Ray. And with Toy Story 2 just around the corner, there's every indication that Pixar will be riding high for some time to come. Which means Steve can concentrate all of his powers of goodness on fixing Apple's availability problems. We hope.

Nobody's going to argue with us if we say the iBook looks "different." But we know there are a few naysayers who might take issue with us saying the iBook looks "cool." And if we were to call the iBook's design "manly," fights would start breaking out, and if we were to go completely over the line and call the iBook's distinctive look "professional," well, all hell would break loose. But that's okay, because all the iBook needs to be is "different" with a dash of "cool." Since it's a consumer-targeted device, "professional" doesn't even enter the picture (and as for "manly," well, there are PowerBooks for those of you who need your notebooks to be sleek and black).

But the fact of the matter is this: Apple's four-corner product strategy doesn't fit everyone's needs perfectly. For example, many professionals who need a portable Mac for business don't need the PowerBook's fourteen-inch screen, video-out, mondo hard disk, super-fast processor, or hefty price tag. Maybe all they need is a rugged laptop that can withstand life on the road, connect them to the office network for the retrieval of email, and let them do basic word processing and spreadsheet tasks on the plane; not every pro laptop user needs a graphics workstation in a bag. For pros who just need a basic portable Mac, the iBook's feature set (and price) may be perfect. Unfortunately, those pros also may not need a Blueberry or Tangerine "Look at me, I'm different!" fashion statement-- and we wouldn't be surprised if more than one business user passed on the iBook on the basis of looks alone.

Now, if you think Apple doesn't know this, you're not giving them enough credit. They know. Whether or not they're actually going to do anything about it is another matter entirely; there have been rumors of a more "business-styled" iBook, but we're not holding our breath in the short term. Why? Because Mac Observer notes that Apple's PR firm, Edleman Worldwide, is looking for a "non-typical" iBook user for a Business Week article. The goal is to find a real, honest-to-goodness iBook user who may be a "finance man"-- "someone who wears a conservative suit to work, but carries a colorful iBook." It sounds like Apple is trying to push the existing iBook as an acceptable accessory in a conservative business setting, rather than changing the iBook's style to better suit the business world. So if you know a conservative businessman who totes around an iBook and wouldn't mind being seen with it by million of readers, send 'em to Edleman. And we're still holding out hope for an iBook Special Edition in Graphite next year...

Great artists steal, and so do computer makers. The whole high-tech industry is basically one huge copy-fest, when you get right down to it. Sure, Microsoft stole the whole GUI/folders/trash can thing from Apple, but you can't say you haven't noticed Windowsisms in the more recent versions of the Mac OS. We're talking about stuff like the little arrows in alias icons, contextual menus, and built-in support for desktop pictures. None of it is ground-breaking or anything, but it just illustrates the point: in high-tech, stealing is what makes the world go 'round. Well, that and innovation-- or else there'd be nothing to steal in the first place. (It just seems a bit unfair that Apple does most of the innovating and the rest of the industry does most of the stealing.)

It's because of all this rampant thievery that we're unsure who first developed the innovation of calling bugs in processors "errata." The first time we heard the term used that way was when Motorola mentioned that existing G4 processors can't be cranked up to 500 MHz or higher because of "errata" in the design that would introduce memory corruption at such high clock speeds. (That's one of the reasons for Apple's recent "speed dump.") But now, faithful viewer Jerry O'Neil points out an article in The Register which details "errata" (not bugs!) in Intel's latest 733 MHz "Coppermine" Pentium III chips. Apparently the German magazine c't has found that "the SPEC suite test computed false results about every 20th run." Whenever there are problems with Intel processors, they're listed as "errata," except for that grand doozy Pentium division bug which was referred to by company execs as a "flaw."

So we're wondering whether Motorola stole the "errata" thing from Intel, or if Intel got it from Motorola. Or maybe both companies took the practice from a third chip manufacturer. Regardless, we like "errata;" it's a nicer-sounding euphemism than the one commonly used for software bugs, which is "issue." There's nothing like a few Latin words to class up the joint. And hey, if your hardware's not going to work right, you might as well be able to complain about it in a classy way, right?