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Special Guest Star (7/8/98)
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We're sure you've heard by now that Captain Steve gave his keynote address not via satellite as originally planned, but live and in person, which was a pleasant surprise for your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff. Following wild cheers and a standing ovation, Apple's "interim" CEO (hee hee, that just gets funnier every time we see it) proceeded to report on the State of the Apple, which consisted primarily of rehashing the strategies already laid out at last May's announcement, and taking every possible opportunity to hype the iMac. (As an aside, now that we've gotten to use one, we can personally assure you that the hype is justified. If you were even toying with the idea of buying one, you will want one. Trust us. Would we lie to you?)

Interestingly enough, though, other than Steve showing up in person, the biggest surprise of the keynote was that, well, that was the biggest surprise of the keynote. No announcement of any megadeal with Disney. No discussion of new "pro-level" G3's to replace the models that were quietly discontinued a couple of days ago. No details of any kind on next year's consumer portable. Sure, there were a few minor surprises, like the very cool new Apple PowerBook G3 DVD Video Solution (which allows PowerBook G3 owners with DVD-ROM modules to watch DVD movies, via hardware decompression of a new PC card) and the official renaming of Rhapsody as "Mac OS X Server," but certainly nothing earth-shattering. We knew the Q3 results would be profitable. We knew that Disney Blast will soon be Mac-compatible (free beta test at http://www.disneyblast.com/mac/). We knew that the iMac's modem would be 56K. Heck, we even knew that Internet Explorer is Steve's "browser of choice."

Was Steve's live presence intended to maximize the effect of his Reality Distortion Field® on the Expo crowd, injecting good vibes into all even though there wasn't much news to report? Is this keynote going to set off a whole new wave of "November 10th Event"-style speculation about what Apple expected to announce, but couldn't because the deal fell through at the last minute? Let those conspiracy theories fly!

Incidentally, for excellent coverage of the keynote in detail, we recommend Don Crabb's analysis over at MacCentral; he doesn't seem to have missed a thing.

 
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The above scene was taken from the 7/8/98 episode:

July 8, 1998: The star of the show appears live and in person to rally the troops. Meanwhile, talk of a third consecutive quarterly profit sends Apple's stock to a new yearly high, and serves as a nice introduction to our quarterly "Beat the Analysts" contest...

Other scenes from that episode:

  • 841: Still in the Black (7/8/98)   As for Q3 being a profitable quarter, what Steve would not say was just how profitable. While he did say we'd all be happy with the results, we won't know the final numbers for another week; results will be posted on July 15th...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...
Vote Early, Vote Often!
Why did you tune in to this '90s relic of a soap opera?
Nostalgia is the next best thing to feeling alive
My name is Rip Van Winkle and I just woke up; what did I miss?
I'm trying to pretend the last 20 years never happened
I mean, if it worked for Friends, why not?
I came here looking for a receptacle in which to place the cremated remains of my deceased Java applets (think about it)

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