It's not as if we all needed reminding that Apple is changing-- the company's hardly the same entity it was even six months ago. But while many of the changes that are taking place are positive ones-- increasing market share, better products, and actual profitability-- others show that some of the nicer points of the Apple we once knew are being left behind in the scramble for corporate viability. For instance, we found it sad when we had to face the fact that Apple no longer had the money to keep funding "cool" research projects that might never turn into profitable products. Seeing Newton get axed was maybe one of the most recent and extreme examples-- in that particular case, there was a product, and a great one-- just one that wasn't profitable enough, and therefore it got canned. Sad.

But that's not nearly as disturbing as hearing that Apple disbanded the Worldwide Disabilities Solutions Group last January. That group was responsible for making sure that each Apple product met the special needs of users with disabilities, and was therefore largely responsible for certain ease-of-use features that wound up benefiting all Mac users, not just differently-abled ones. But things get even worse, however, when you consider the way in which Apple eliminated this group. One of the most important projects of the WDSG was a web site called Convomania, which was a resource for teens with life-threatening diseases. When the users of Convomania wished to continue the site on their own, Apple threatened them with legal action for "modifying the company's online property without consent." Details about this decidedly unApplelike behavior are available in a Wired News article. (The Convomaniacs have since shown remarkable tenacity and resourcefulness by pulling up stakes and settling elsewhere, under the name "ConvoNation.") We at AtAT sincerely hope that this in an isolated incident-- a temporary lapse, and not a new and fundamental sort of inability to "think different" and spend $1 million a year on WDSG and Convomania in the face of quarterly $50 million profits. The bottom line isn't the only bottom line, if you catch our drift.

On a personal note, when my father was recovering from extensive eye surgery, the Mac was the only computer he could use, due to the presence of the CloseView control panel, which I talked his secretary through setting up for him over the phone. Now, four years later, my father is an avid Mac user, grateful not only for a computer easy enough for a self-confessed technophobe like him to use, but for a computer so easy to use and well-designed that he could continue to use it even when he was nearly blind. It's scenarios like that that have given Apple its vaunted "rabid user loyalty." Let's hope that the elimination of groups like the WDSG, which gave the Mac the same features that inspired such loyalty, doesn't turn Apple into "just another computer company."

Speaking of million-dollar gambles, it's beginning to sound like Apple's $1.5 million advertising investment during the final episode of "Seinfeld" has paid off after all. MacNN pointed the way to a Business Wire article about a poll in which web surfers identified Apple as one of the companies whose ads they liked best. (If you missed Apple's 30-second "Seinfeldized" version of its original "Think Different" ad, we've still got it in Quicktime 3.0 format here.)

That comes as at least a mild surprise to us, since we felt that the commercial wasn't particularly engaging, and certainly wasn't worth spending a million or two to show only once. But among 485 people who registered their opinions on the web, the Apple ad was listed among those the viewers remembered most, and it (along with the Budweiser ad) was also listed as a "favorite commercial overall." It's almost as if Apple knows exactly what it's doing. ;-)

As for the "Seinfeld" final episode itself, well, it didn't fare nearly as well as Apple's commercial did. Only about a third of the respondents considered it to be "Very Good" or better, and almost half said they were disappointed. The official AtAT rating for the show is "not very good," and believe us, it's not because of the so-called "dark" ending. It just felt like everyone was plodding through their lines, with little or no interest in what was going on around them. That's okay-- we've still got all those classic episodes in syndication. (Last night they showed the Chinese restaurant one. We love that one.)

We thought some people might be interested to know that parodies of Apple's "Think Different" campaign are still popping up here and there. This time, it's a print ad for Think Skateboards in the June 1998 issue of Thrasher Magazine. (Hey, no smart cracks-- your friendly AtAT staff has been subscribing for eight years now.)

The ad is a sepiatone photo of an Apple billboard in San Francisco. The billboard has been altered to show Think's pro skater Tim McKenney, the "Think Different" slogan has been replaced with the skater's name, and the Apple logo has been changed into Think's crown logo. The caption at the top of the page reads, "Think Skateboards-- Thinking Totally Different." You can see a crude reproduction of the ad here. We think it's kind of cool that the "Think Different" ads resonate strongly enough that even completely unrelated businesses, even ones as unusual as the skateboarding industry, are noticing and doing parodies.

Forgive the ickiness of the image, but we haven't purchased a scanner yet. (We're waiting for the Mac version of the new Microtek ScanMaker X6 to be released next month-- it's purple!) In order to get the image, we took two snapshots of the magazine page, one top and one bottom, with our trusty Quicktake 150, and then stitched the two halves together in Photoshop, trying to correct for differences in lighting and scale. Hey, you make do with what you have. How's that for thinking different? :-)