Oh that wacky Phil Schiller; always fomenting uprising and rebellion! Actually, you know, we never really thought of him as the freedom fighter type; he looks a little more like the guy you'd eat nachos with while watching a golf instructional video. But it's obviously true what they say about not judging books by their affable and slightly puffy covers, because today Phil revealed that he's a firebrand at heart-- and all of you who tuned into the QuickTime Live keynote webcast know what we're talking about. (And no, it wasn't just Phil's oblique reference to Mike Dell telling people he invented wireless networking-- although we're sure that Steve's mighty proud of his protégé for squeezing in that little zinger.)

For those of you who shun any and all keynotes at which His Steveness is not presiding, allow us to fill you in: today Apple announced and demonstrated QuickTime 6, with complete support for the long-awaited MPEG-4 video standard. And Phil, together with our personal hero, comrade Frank "Shout at the Devil" Casanova (insert "hail Satan" heavy metal hand gesture here), demonstrated all sorts of incredible ways in which the fully scalable MPEG-4 standard can be used: live video broadcasts wirelessly via a PowerBook and AirPort; DV footage encoded and served to set-top boxes via a Sun server; even color MPEG-4 video streaming onto a mobile phone. This is nifty stuff--- but we can't have it yet.

Why? Well, it's not because of the technology lagging; Phil held up a CD-ROM and stated that QuickTime 6 is done and ready for release. Instead, Apple is holding back until the MPEG-4 licensing terms improve. Basically, it breaks down like this: under the terms of the current proposed license, developers (such as Apple) would pay a quarter for each MPEG-4 encoder shipped, up to a maximum of $1 million per year; the same goes for the decoder. That's $2 million a year in fees that Apple would have to cough up-- and Phil says he's just fine with that. What he's not happy about is that the license also taxes content providers with a royalty, meaning that Apple's customers would have to pay to use the technology... and that's something that deeply offends Mr. Schiller's sense of fair play.

Hence, the hardball tactics: Apple is "delaying" the release of QuickTime 6 until MPEG-LA (the folks who hold most of the MPEG-4 patents) revises its licensing terms to allow broadcasters to offer up MPEG-4 content royalty-free. And did Phirebrand Phil entreat his entire audience (both meatspace and virtual) to write to MPEG-LA in hopes of getting them to loosen up on the provider royalties? You bet he did-- heck, for convenience's sake, he even gave out the address where well-reasoned requests may be sent: licensing@mpegla.com. If you're a content broadcaster who'd have to pony up some dough under the current terms, help Phil help you by expressing your displeasure to the patent holders. And hurry it up-- the rest of us want QuickTime 6 too, ya know.

Speaking of QuickTime content, faithful viewer Sledgehammer Smythe was the first to point out that there are a couple of new additions to Apple's ads page-- or, at least, there were. From last night until this afternoon, there were two new iMac spots linked there, which have since mysteriously vanished. Fear not, though; there's still a link to the action on Apple's QuickTime page, which means that you're just a couple of clicks away from seeing what happens when two Jobsian companies collide.

Yep, them rumors were no jive; none other than Pixar, Steve's other little enterprise, was tapped to produce a couple of short animated spots introducing the new iMac to the world. One piece is thirty seconds long and shows the iMac hopping joyfully about to a peppy techno number while apparently emanating some distinctly R2-D2esque chirps and whistles; eventually it calms down enough to say "hi." The other is just fifteen seconds in length, but we consider it to be the far more effective of the two; the iMac watches curiously as its SuperDrive tray repeatedly extends and retracts, until it's embarrassed to notice that it has an audience. You have to see it to appreciate it, but believe us when we say that Pixar's talent for humanizing the inert shines through again.

Of course, the appearance of these two spots on Apple's ads page is no doubt kicking up the usual firestorm of controversy about whether or not the new ads suck. We can hear the complaints already-- "doesn't tell you anything about the system," "where are the price/performance figures," "why is the new iMac staring at its private parts," etc. Before you get too worked up, we should probably mention that we're pretty sure these aren't actual TV commercials (yet). For one thing, honest-to-goodness ads tend to appear on Apple's web site only after they've debuted in a very visible time slot on network TV, and we have yet to receive a single report from anyone who's seen either piece on the air. For another, Apple refers to them as "short films" and not as commercials, despite the fact that they happen to appear in the "ads" directory on its server. There's also the fact that they were yanked from Apple's real ads page, probably in an attempt to stem exactly this sort of confusion.

Now, while some of you are heaving a sigh of relief that the public's televisual introduction to the iMac won't be the two spots that faithful viewer Jeff has already dubbed "Never Take Acid During an Aerobics Workout" and "New iMac Caught Using Digital Viagra," we should also mention that we think they'd make lovely commercials. Let's face it: thirty seconds is a woefully short period of time in which to convey any substantive information, and any attempt by Apple to capture the public's attention with product specs, comparative performance numbers, or the like would probably be doomed to fail. The iMac's biggest strength from a sales perspective is its personality, and these two spots have so much of the stuff it's dripping all over the rug. Make the public smile, and they might just go looking for more info on the iMac when computer-shopping time rolls around.

If nothing else, we think these spots would make great eyeball-grabbing teaser ads that could be followed up by more developed pieces underscoring the iMac's versatility as a powerful digital hub. In any case, these animations are way too cute to confine to the 'net, so we hope Apple finds some way to get them in front of a broader audience. Ah, heck, if nothing else, we suppose Steve can just stick 'em in front of the next Pixar feature.

Heads up, people; it's 10-Q time again, which means that fans of overly-cautious, bordering-on-gloomy financial filings can pore over a ridiculously huge volume of stuff in hopes of extracting some relevant dirt about everyone's favorite Cupertino fruit market. Or, as faithful viewer Bob Gulien suggests, you could just take a quick peek at The Register's bite-sized coverage instead, thereby saving yourself eight or nine hours of sifting through data so dry it would put a heavily-caffeinated hummingbird into a coma. It's entirely up to you. We're all about free will.

Probably the most relevant figure is an actual number attached to the unspecified job cuts which Apple briefly mentioned in last month's quarterly earnings report; it seems that the company had 425 positions headed for the axe-- according to CNET, 375 have already been trimmed, and 50 more are still being primed for the chopping block. These positions were mainly in the "operations, information systems, and administrative areas," and while pinks slips are never good news, we're trying to decide whether it would be terribly gauche to be thankful that at least Apple isn't shedding engineers and developers. These cuts look more like the pruning of a balanced company calmly reacting to changes in the economic tides than a last-ditch effort to cauterize fiscal bleeding.

Let's look at a f'rinstance, here. F'rinstance, according to Yahoo! Finance, Apple's last reported headcount was 9,603; back in October of last year, that number was 8,568. And about a year earlier in September of 2000, Apple had a mere 6,960 employees. So even taking those 425 pink slips into account, it looks to us like Apple is still growing overall at a time when other companies are sawing off limbs to stay afloat.

Sure, if Apple had managed to avoid layoffs completely, it'd be a lot nicer for everybody-- not least the poor (ex-)Apple employees who are now, or will soon be, out of a job. Still, though, we see a pretty noticeable difference between Apple's job cuts and, say, Gateway's. But then again, whereas Apple is being run by a brilliant marketer with the uncanny ability to bend people to his will, Gateway is being run by a man perfectly willing to go on television and show the world that he solicits business advice from a talking cow...