There have been a lot of changes at Apple over the last couple of years, to be sure, but one of the most significant is that they finally seem to be listening. They listen to what customers, developers, and resellers have to say, and they even seem to be heeding some of that advice. Think about some of the relatively recent strategic moves Apple has made, based on feedback from the tech community. Just a couple of weeks ago, Apple announced that it had licensed the OpenGL 3D APIs from SGI, in response to games developers who said that it was important. Bigger still was the way that Apple scrapped its original Rhapsody operating system plans, which required all developers to rewrite their applications from scratch in order to work at their fullest potential; instead, Apple came up with Mac OS X and Carbon, which requires only a "tune-up" on the part of third-party developers.

There have been product changes due to customer feedback, too; remember how the iMac was originally going to ship with a 33.6 kbps modem? And how the revision A iMacs had only a Rage II graphics chip and 2MB of video RAM? Well, it looks like Apple's listening again-- to the people saying that the Mac's audio system is really starting to sound substandard. Take, for example, the iMac and its two front-mounted stereo speakers; they're not bad, but they could sound a lot better. While the speakers themselves are certainly at least partially to blame, even when connecting external speakers, the sound that comes out of most Macs isn't as full as it could be. But take heart! Apple hears your pain, and has taken steps to boost the audio power of its Macs with some new technology from Spatializer Audio Laboratories.

Yes, according to an Apple press release, starting later this year Apple will include several of Spatializer's sound-enhancement systems in all of its computers, which will provide better sound all around. The new technology essentially improves 3D stereo positioning and beefs up the bass, even with only two conventional speakers. We're adopting a "wait and see" attitude before we get too excited about the whole thing, but we like the idea of listening to CD's through a PowerBook's built-in speakers and not hearing it sound like one of those crystal radios we built when we were kids.