Oooo, wow-- pretty slow news day, wasn't it? We kept waiting for something exciting to happen, but by around 10 PM Eastern we'd started to despair; historically speaking, most arrests of high-tech CEOs for drunkenly inciting a food riot in the aisles of a Circle K happen before 6 PM local time, so apparently Steve wasn't going to help us make with the drama. But hey, there's a lot of music software coming out for the Mac! That's dramatic. Right? Right?

Well, our Moms say it's dramatic. So there.

So here's the thing: according to a press release, Apple has just taken the wraps off of Logic Pro 6, the latest edition of its professional audio production software. (At least, it's Apple's now-- you may recall that the company got it by snapping up eMagic last year during one of Steve's shopping binges.) Since we aren't "in the biz," we wouldn't know good pro audio editing software if it crept up and bit us playfully on the kiester, but people tell us that Logic is the good stuff, and Logic Pro 6 apparently "consolidates 12 pre-existing, groundbreaking products into one comprehensive package for just $999." So if you'd been looking to break a whole lotta ground but you figured you'd need about a dozen tools to do it and you have to keep the price under a grand, hey, this sounds like just the thing you need.

But say you're not a music pro yet, but you're enrolled in music school because it seemed like a fun alternative to studying at home for your "official education-style certificate" in gun repair. Students are broke-- and if the ones we know are representative of the subspecies, music students are especially broke, presumably because you get the intersection of the whole "penniless student" and "starving artist" thing. No way no how can the average music student afford $999 for Logic Pro 6, right?

And that's why Apple has also introduced Logic Express 6. Yes, in the grand tradition of Final Cut Express comes its audio analogue, a cut-down version of Logic Pro priced affordably at just $299. Sure, you can only work with 48 tracks instead of the Pro version's 128, but c'mon, you're a student-- like you're really going to use more than, what... three? Four? Seven, if you're working on your doctorate piece? And you're getting 37.5% of the track capacity for just 30% of the price! Such a deal! (Of course, you also get fewer input channels and audio effects, so you should probably check out Apple's comparison chart before you shell out the cash. Neither version will ship until March, so you've got time to figure it out.)

But wait, there's more! Apple also "previewed" the next generation of Logic to attendees at NAMM (wow, even the name is musical, isn't it? "NAMMMMMMM...") and dropped the price of Soundtrack by a hundred clams while posting a 1.2 update. And on the third-party tip, MacRumors notes-- ha ha, "notes," get it?-- that the long-awaited Mac OS X version of the music notation software Finale 2004 will start shipping tomorrow, January 16th. And what about the rest of us no-talent shlubs who aren't music pros or even studying to be music pros? No worries, we're covered too; don't forget, the 16th is also the official release date for iLife '04, so it's time for us to get our GarageBand mojo workin' now.

See? Mac music software for everyone! Tell us that's not just soaked in drama. Go on, tell us.

Well, okay. Maybe Steve will hurl a Twinkie at the guy behind the counter tomorrow. Hope springs eternal.

Okay, so as Mac users, we're now (or soon will be) swimming in new music software; how about some sweet, sweet sugar for the pixel-pushers out there? Well, sadly, the news on the graphics software front is sort of going in the other direction: faithful viewer mrmgraphics tipped us off to a Macworld UK article which reveals that CorelDraw Graphics Suite is now officially kaput for the Mac. No more development, time to say bye-bye. So if you're a big user of CorelDraw, Photo-Paint, or R.A.V.E., now's the time to commence the grieving process so you can zip right though denial ("No! Not CorelDraw!"), anger ("NO!! NOT CORELDRAW!!"), bargaining ("Anything but CorelDraw!"), depression ("Boo hoo, no more CorelDraw..."), and acceptance ("Oh well, what's on TV?") and start considering alternatives.

Corel's reason for transitioning CorelDraw Graphics Suite into a Windows-only product is that "Corel has not experienced that much demand for this product from Mac users." Reportedly "96 per cent of Corel Graphics Suite sales have been of the Windows version" and "the ten per cent of sales to Mac users were insufficient to justify Mac development." 96% of the product's sales are of the Windows version and 10% are of the Mac version? Okay, we may not exactly be math whizzes down here, but even we're pretty sure that there's something wrong with this picture. Suppose they've also found that a further 37% of total sales were of the Playstation edition and 209% were of its immensely popular port to the Etch A Sketch platform? Man, it's a good thing they don't make spreadsheet software or anything.

Wait. They do?

Well, does anyone buy it? Because seriously, they really should hear about this 96% + 10% thing. Then again, they're Windows users, so why would we care? Moving on...

While the discontinuation of the Mac version of CorelDraw may sting the software's few users a bit, the good news is that Adobe is ready and waiting to take their money. We're guessing that Corel's low 10% (or 4%, or whatever the heck it really is) Mac user percentage is because just about everyone working in graphics uses Photoshop and Illustrator instead. And if you're dependent on other Mac-native Corel products, don't worry-- the company "has no plans to end development of its remaining Mac products." So it's not going to turn around and cancel our version of Bryce, for example. Or WordPerfect.

Um... Huh.

You know what? All of you Painter users might want to prepare yourselves for that whole grief thing too. Just in case.

Oh, for crying out Pete's sake-- we just said we aren't math whizzes, and yet now we're going to have to bust out the calculator anyway just to convince you people that Apple isn't about to collapse into insolvency or something. You all know that Apple's quarterly earnings conference call revealed a ton of good news, right? Well, faithful viewer Mace notes that, according to IDC figures reported by MacNN, "Apple last year shipped 1,675,000 units compared with 1,679,000 in 2002." (They're talking about Macs, not iPods or anything like that.) So Apple shipped fewer Macs last year than in the year before-- which, granted, doesn't sound good at all.

But here's the thing: remember how in the fourth calendar quarter of 2003 (that'd be fiscal Q1/04, the one we just heard about yesterday) Apple reported that it had "shipped 829 thousand Macintosh units during the quarter, up 12 percent from the year-ago quarter"? That's important. Hang onto that juicy little tidbit while we take you on a little tour of Quarterly Earnings Past.

For the third calendar quarter of 2003, Apple reported that it had shipped 787,000 Macs, which was "up 7 percent from the year-ago quarter." For the quarter before that, it said that it had shipped 771,000 Macs-- but there was no mention of how that compared to the year before, which should be a clue. Well, as it turns out, in the same quarter of 2002, Apple shipped 808,000 Macs, so the 2003 figure was actually a 4.6% decrease. And the quarter before that? 711,000 Macs-- again, no mention of the year before, but a little digging reveals that in 2002 it had been 813,000 Macs shipped, and so last year's numbers were a 12.5% decrease.

So-- time to put all this together. First of all, you may have noticed that Apple's quarterly unit shipments don't add up to IDC's at all. IDC says 1,675,000; total up the numbers from Apple's individual calendar-2003 quarterly results and you get 3,098,000. We have no idea why this is; maybe IDC doesn't include education sales or something like that. MacNN reports that "IDC counts shipments to distribution channels and end users, inclusively." Maybe Apple counts something else. Who knows? all we can say is, we're reasonably confident that Apple knows how many freakin' Macs Apple shipped each quarter. For all we know, IDC gets its numbers from the nightly Lotto drawing.

Now look at Apple's growth for each calendar quarter of last year, as compared to the same quarter the year before. From January through March, unit shipments shrunk by 12.5%. Not good. From April through June, they shrunk again-- but this time, only by 4.6%. That's better. From July through September, they finally grew by a respectable 7%. And to close out the year, from October through December they grew by 12%. Notice a trend? It's a good one, isn't it?

And heck, even look at the number of Macs shipped in each quarter moving forward: 711K, 771K, 787K, and 829K. See that? They go up every quarter. Neat, huh? That didn't happen in 2002, when the numbers (according to Apple) were 813K, 808K, 734K, and 743K; they shrunk every quarter until they started to tick upwards again right at the end of the year. And if you go by Apple's numbers, the company shipped just as many Macs in 2002-- 3,098,000-- as it did in 2003. So, no growth when you look at it as year-by-year (similar to the teensy 4,000-Mac year-over-year decline that IDC reported), but quarter-by-quarter it looks to us like Apple had a terrific 2003, with both sequential growth in raw sales and accelerating growth percentage-wise when each quarter is compared to the same one the year before.

Okay, no more math; time for the qualitative wrap-up. What's all this mean? To us it means that Apple picked up steam throughout 2003, releasing more and more must-have products as the year went on. It went from shrinkage to growth, improving consistently in every single quarter. So when IDC says that Apple's total 2003 shipments shrunk a bit compared to its total the year before, we're not even remotely worried, because as always, the real question is this: "What have you done for me lately?" And lately, it seems like Apple's doing pretty darn well.