If you think reporting directly to Steve Jobs makes for a challenging career situation, just try holding a position that also involves the occasional interview. We all know that Steve is fanatical about product secrecy, which makes being interviewed particularly tough; you'd have to come off as interesting enough to make the company look good, but you couldn't talk about upcoming products and all the cool stuff that Apple is secretly working on without having your head subsequently removed from your shoulders by a rather agitated CEO. As they say, it's a fine line between Dullsville and decapitation.

So we're rather proud of Apple's software Main Man, Avie Tevanian. In his recent interview for an Australian IT news site, he managed to spill just enough detail to prevent things from becoming a snore-fest, while still managing to keep a tight lid on Apple's trade secrets. Among the little tidbits he dropped to keep us on our toes: in his estimation, Mac OS X 10.1 will be "five times faster" than 10.0 when it hits the streets; it's a "very sound assumption" that Apple won't be porting Final Cut Pro (and Apple's other currently Mac-only killer apps, we suppose) to Windows; and while Apple may not tackle the enterprise market anytime soon, "from a technology viewpoint" Apple is "now much better positioned" to cross that bridge if it so chooses. Nothing earth-shattering, but enough to give us a little thrill.

Most importantly, though, we're extremely pleased to see Avie described as "untense" and "far more relaxed than one might have imagined." Remember, this is the guy ultimately responsible for bringing Apple the Holy Grail of UNIX power and Mac-like simplicity in one tidy package. If he can face that kind of pressure and still be calm, he's either a really centered individual with the near-superhuman ability to relax in the face of Herculean challenges, or he's an android. Either way, we think he's pretty darn cool. A third possibility is that he's just keeping all his tension balled up inside; we sincerely hope not, because if he is, he's going to take an awful lot of innocent people with him when he finally pops. We're leaning towards the whole "android" thing, ourselves.