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Not Enough RDF To Go Around (2/9/01)
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Okay, so Apple's stock price is hovering near the $20 mark, which is a substantial improvement from when it bottomed out at about $13 a couple of months back; still, it's tough to argue that the company is anything but troubled. After all, that $20 stock price is still way, way down from the $75 it hit almost a year ago, the company lost nearly a quarter of a billion dollars last quarter, and we're still nervous about how Apple cranks out cool new technologies and then either a) can't sell them (e.g. the Cube) or b) can't ship enough of them (e.g. the PowerBook G4). So what's with all of this bad karma raining down hard on Apple's head?
Here's our latest theory: there's a universal and unalterable Conservation of Steve at work. Because while Apple continues to flop around like a performance artist with a live trout in his pants, it's easy for Mac people to forget that Steve heads up two companies these days. Remember Pixar? While Apple's busy building insanely great Macs, Pixar's cranking out insanely great computer animation-- and despite the fact that the company hasn't had a theatrical release since 1999's Toy Story 2, Pixar is doing quite well even as Apple continues to flounder. As faithful viewer The Amazing Llama points out, Insanely Great Mac reports that Pixar's latest quarterly results were a far cry from Apple's relatively dismal numbers; the company's Q4 profit of $35.2 million was up from $9.6 million in the same quarter a year ago. (That's a whopping 267% increase, for the calculatorily-challenged.) That's Pixar's "biggest quarter to date."
Note that this news comes mere weeks after Apple reported its worst results since the Amelio Era-- even worse than the only other quarterly loss Apple has posted in AtAT's entire broadcast history, during 1997's "Gil-To-Steve Transition Period." Clearly this is incontestible evidence that when Pixar's up, Apple's down-- because there's only so much Steve to go around. Here's hoping that the mole-people denizens of Apple's super-secret underground research pit are close to a successful completion of the ongoing "Hey, Let's Clone Steve" project, because frankly, we don't see any other way for both companies to stay on top.
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SceneLink (2854)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 2/9/01 episode: February 9, 2001: BTO PowerBook G4 customers receive word that their orders have been pushed back to February 24th. Meanwhile, Apple may be down, but Pixar is up, up, up-- and the man officially slated to deliver the keynote address at the upcoming Macworld Expo in Tokyo is (try to contain your amazement) none other than Steve Jobs himself...
Other scenes from that episode: 2853: Just Spreading The Ill Will (2/9/01) Did you ever have one of those days when you really shouldn't have bothered to get out of bed in the morning? After oversleeping due to unsettling dreams, finally arising to discover yet more snow, shoveling said snow for forty minutes in the rain, and then spending an hour on the phone trying to talk an extraordinarily stupid person through accomplishing what should have been a mind-numbingly simple task (turns out this person was running the 68K version of Netscape on an iMac, despite the fact that every iMac ever shipped has a PowerPC version of the software preinstalled), we're just generally in a foul mood... 2855: Land Of The Rising Steve (2/9/01) Not enough Steve in your life right now? Are you suffering from listlessness brought on by a nasty onslaught of Steve deficiency? Well, what do you expect? It's been a month since the man's last keynote address, so you're obviously due for a booster shot-- especially if you neglected to follow doctor's orders and only experienced Steve via webcast, instead of live, in-person, and extra-strength...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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