Ah, the Apple comeback story: it's just like a fairy tale, except that Prince Charming is played by Prince Mercurial, and instead of slaying a vicious dragon or smooching some fabulous babe with narcolepsy, he just took a company that was at death's door and turned it into a profitable outfit with a stable of sparkling products and some decent media buzz. Still, Happily Ever After and all that jazz, you know? Economic downturns and slow-selling "Magic Cubes" notwithstanding.

Seriously, Gil Amelio may have been hired as a turnaround champ to save Apple's bacon, but his single greatest contribution to the cause was hiring, and then getting kicked out by, Steve Jobs. Some may claim that Gil laid the foundation for a sustained corporate comeback, but few will argue that it was Steve's energy (and his ability to bend spoons with his mind) that really got Apple back on its feet. What's more, he accomplished the impossible while heading up both Apple and Pixar, thus ensuring that the world would never suffer from a lack of Macs or a dearth of computer-animated cowboys and blue mutant four-limbed ants. So is it any wonder that Steve's our hero?

Which brings us to another company currently redefining the word "beleaguered": as faithful viewer Ray points out, Reuters reports that Palm's CEO, Carl Yankowski, just made a surprise run for the lifeboats. He resigned last night, citing "Palm's transition into two individual businesses" (basically a split into hardware and software groups) as the reason why his role "no longer matches [his] aspirations." Gee, we would have thought it was less about long-term career goals and more about botched product launches, a withering market share, and a stock price that's down some 95% from its yearly high. Just shows you how little we understand big business, we suppose.

Anyway, Palm is clearly a company that needs saving-- and who better to do it than SuperSteve? After all, we figure he's got plenty of time on his hands, what with only two CEO positions dividing his attention (plus some measly diversion called a "family life"). Surely a third CEOship would suit his schedule well, and what with his previous repeated attempts to buy Palm, we figure he'd love a chance to get the company back on its feet in exchange for a dollar and a couple of jets. C'mon, Palm's board: listen to the poor suckers at AtAT who took a bath on Palm shares and make Steve an offer. After all, we'd like at least some of our money back...

Holy Consumer Confusion, Batman! Scarcely a week has passed since Apple announced the availability of iDVD 2, and now faithful viewer Paul Kaplan tips us off to the surprising fact that suddenly iDVD is available for Windows. Sort of. There's just one little catch: the Windows iDVD of which we speak has nothing whatsoever to do with the consumer-friendly DVD authoring tool we know and love, or even with Apple itself-- at least, until Apple's lawyers get involved.

Indeed, this "other" iDVD comes from a company called RAVISENT, and it doesn't much look like anything Uncle Steve would want to show off during a keynote address. Now, alternative items sporting the names of Apple's products are nothing new; for example, there's another ibook, and even another iPOD. But while those two products are very different from Apple's offerings (software for creating "interactive electronic books on the Web" and a voice-over-IP PBX connection unit, respectively), RAVISENT's iDVD just happens to be consumer-targeted software for the creation of DVDs on DVD-R media. Sound familiar at all?

However, despite the fact that RAVISENT's product's identical name and same basic functionality are likely to cause some confusion in the market, Apple's lawyers may just have to keep their guns holstered this time. While we see a slew of trademark symbols plastered all over RAVISENT's press release introducing iDVD, earlier today MacMinute briefly noted that Apple's own press release announcing the availability of iDVD 2 is notably lacking the same. Indeed, iDVD is conspicuously missing from the list of "registered trademarks or trademarks of Apple" at the end of the release. What do you suppose is up with that?

So there it is: two iDVDs, no waiting. At least one is strictly for Windows and the other is for the Mac, because otherwise things would get really scary. And speaking of scary, how much fun would it be if RAVISENT decided to sue Apple for trademark infringement? Oooh, we've got goosebumps just thinking about it. Any suggestions on what Apple should call the product if it's legally forced to drop the "iDVD" moniker? We're kind of pulling for "Super Video Fun Happy Hour," ourselves...

Thought Apple's iTunes 2.0 installer bug-- you remember, the one that sent gigabytes of user data to that Great Bitbucket In The Sky last Friday night-- was just a fluke? Well, here at AtAT we're always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, so we sure did... only now we're starting to think that maybe Apple's software quality control team is off on a cycling tour of Europe or something, because fairly massive "issues" seem to be coming out of Apple with alarming regularity lately.

Here's the latest: faithful viewer Lombard Roadkill (who really should consider suing Ma and Pa Roadkill for giving him that name) reports that he's an unfortunate PowerBook user who, after installing Apple's latest Mac OS X Security Update, suddenly found himself completely unable to start up Classic; when he tries, it just sits there forever with a grey screen. Mac OS 9, on the other hand, boots just fine-- it's only Classic that's hosed. However, for most Mac OS X users, that's a pretty serious handicap, considering how many of us depend on non-native applications to get our work done every day. (We, ourselves, would be far less productive if we had to keep booting into Mac OS 9 just to play Monopoly.)

And this is by no means an isolated thingule: an article over at The Mac Observer confirms that mostly PowerBook G4 owners are getting hit with the bug, but we've been receiving reports from owners of other PowerBook models that have also been rendered Classicless. If this is Apple's subtle way of telling us that we should all start paying to upgrade to Carbonized applications, maybe they should have waited until there are more than six of them available.

But back to the quality control issue for a second... By far the most disturbing aspect of this whole "Dead Classic" nightmare is that several people are reporting that their brand new PowerBooks fail to launch Classic, right out of the box. That strikes us as a pretty glaring thing to miss on Apple's part. Maybe this is just a phase. We'll know for sure if, say, Mac OS X 10.1.1 ships without a DVD player-- and a Finder.