Apple Eclectic’s Review of 2008: April

April was shaping up to be a rather dull month, all things considered. The main challenge during the first couple of days was sifting the real news stories from the oh so hilarious April Fool’s jokes. I mean, did people honestly think that we’d believe Apple was threatening legal action against the great city of New York over their use of an apple-shaped logo? Or that MIT was sponsoring something called the “Quake Catcher Network”, which sought to monitor seismic activity using the motion sensors built into laptops like the MacBook? Or that Woz and Kathy ‘no, I’ve never heard of her either, but I guess she’s famous in America’ Griffin — surely the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman of our generation — had split up? Pull the other one, it plays the start-up chime.

April was the month when Apple finally wrestled the ‘No. 1 American Music Seller’ crown away from Wal*Mart. On the back of this it shot to 103rd place in the Fortune 500 list of America’s bestest companies. Apple’s Q2 earnings call revealed they had made $1.05 billion in profits on $7.51 billion in revenue, having sold 2,289,000 Macs, 10,644,000 iPods and 1,703,000 iPhones. They also revealed that over 200,000 developers had signed up for the iPhone SDK. Apple’s share price fell on the news.

The Final Cut and Mac OS X Server product tours began this month, as a prelude to their successful transfer to Broadway. Also this month, Apple buys PA Semi, paying $278 for the chip maker in a move apparently designed purely to fuel the blogging rumour mills. Speculation that Apple will return to PowerPC with their own line of CPUs continues to run rife, although the truth is more likely to lie with the disclosure that PA Semi supplied chips to the US Military. (Hint: You never see Steve Jobs and SkyNet in the same place at the same time, do you?)

From the ‘believe it or not’ files comes the story of the woman from Santa Cruz who had her Mac stolen in a break-in, only to recover it using Back to My Mac. After a friend noticed that the Mac’s iChat session was on-line, the woman logged in through .Mac and was able to use the computer’s iSight to take pictures of the thief. Although it’s been repeated a few times since, this is probably the earliest report we can find of a Mac user getting Back to My Mac to work.

So with nothing much going on it looked like April 2008 would go down in history as just another dull month of Apple watching. But the actions of an unknown Florida company were to put pay to that notion. In a splutter of publicity, Psystar announced that it would start selling Mac clones. Cunningly disguised as a particularly ugly PC, and quickly renamed from ‘OpenMac’ to ‘Open Computer’, the Psystar machines were to offer potential Mac purchasers an alternative to the aesthetics and legality offered by Apple. In reply, Apple gave the iMac a minor speed bump and ordered the cloning of another batch of lawyers. “Begun, the clone wars had,” as every single bloody blog remarked.