Perhaps it can all be chalked up to a holiday miracle, but Robert Morgan of Apple Recon and the RFI Report seems a lot happier with what Apple's doing these days. Let's face it; Morgan's usually a grinch when it comes to almost anything Apple does, so last week when he pulled a one-eighty on the three-PCI-slot debate you could have knocked us over with a feather. He's being just as vague as ever about whatever "information" he claims to have, but he flat-out apologized for lambasting Apple for sticking with only three slots in their pro-level Macs, and stated that he now "gets it" and sees how Apple is planning on keeping the content-creators happy. Okay.

So that was spooky enough, but his latest piece on the Apple set-top box is the icing on the cake. Remember earlier this year, when rumors were flying that Apple was preparing to release a WebTV-like set-top Mac that was capable of surfing the web and running some other very basic software, but also playing DVD movies and CD's? It was referred to in the press as the AMP, or Apple Media Player, and some reports claimed that its code-name was "Columbus." Well, nothing ever came of that, and most people eventually dismissed the rumors as false. Morgan, however, harped on the issue for months, saying that not releasing the AMP (which he swore up and down was a real thing) was the mistake that would send Apple to its death-- he was as ascerbic about the AMP as Don Crabb is about the three-slots thing.

So Morgan's latest take on the set-top box issue isn't a recanting of his deeply-held conviction that set-top boxes are key to winning the market; rather, he says that Apple's apparent goal to forgo making the boxes themselves in favor of trying to get QuickTime 4.0 to be the software basis of all those boxes is a better move. So once again, he says that Apple's doing the right thing after all. Kinda creepy-- we feel like we're in some sci-fi pod movie or something. "Who are you, and what have you done with the real Robert Morgan?"