Apple Eclectic’s Review of 2008: May

As the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the iMac rolled around, the massive reversal of fortunes which Apple had experienced over the previous decade was thrown into sharp focus. Apple’s market cap passed four-times that of so-called-arch-rival Dell. Oh, how we laughed each and every time someone suggested that Dell should be shut down and the money given back to the shareholders. Each and every time.

Steve Jobs made the 2008 TIME 100 list of the World’s Most Influential People. Unfortunately they neglected to assign numbered positions to the listees, so we’ll just assume that Jobs took his customary position at no. 0. This month also saw Apple winning another two D&AD — dyslexic role playing Design and Art Direction — awards, meaning that over the years they had collected more of the ‘black pencil’ gongs than any other company. Apple’s share price fell on the news.

But Apple didn’t have it all their own way in May. Sales of the Zune hit the 2 million unit mark, and riding this renewed wave of apathy, Microsoft announced the randomly-numbered Windows 7. In settlement of a lawsuit over the poor performance of the batteries in their 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation iPods, Apple agreed to pay out $45 Canadian to those affected — making the iPod the gift that just keeps on giving. And something called ClimateCounts.org took up Greenpeace’s mantle and gave Apple a lousy rating in some spurious environmental assessment.

Hype surrounding the up-comming Pixar movie Wall-E was driven up a notch by the revelation that Jonny Ive had a hand in designing character Eve. Eve was the little probe droid with the shiny white casing, elegant lines, innate intellectual curiosity, five new pairs of sneakers, and a price tag about 10% higher than similarly-speced search robots.

In software, OCD-’em-up Delicious Library 2 is finally released, as is Mac OS X 10.5.3. The usual forensic analysis revealed a number of hidden strings hinting that .Mac was due for a renaming. Coupled with reports of the closing of Apple’s 5th Avenue Store for filming, speculation about the announcement due to be made at next month’s WWDC began to fly. For some people, June couldn’t roll around fast enough.