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[FX: Blast of up-tempo elevator techno, spotlights prowl a vast stage, empty except for a monitor and a cardboard box. On bounds a man attempting to belie his middle years with extra boundiness. Steve Jobs (for it is he) takes the mic to rapturous applause.] Yo! [Cheering and screaming.] My fellow Americans... [Hushed silence] My fellow developers. My fellow Apple enthusiasts. I know it's traditional at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference for the Apple CEO to show off something really... really... neat. Well, I've got not one, but two pieces of unutterable neatitude to display for you today. But, first, the traditional sales and new products graph. [A projector kicks in, displaying an exponential 'hockey-stick' graph] There it is. I don't know what it means but it's probably good news. I do know that we, as a community, shipped 4500 new Mac products last year! [Applause so rapturous you'd think you were watching Billy Graham] And over 2500 of those were either MP3 encoders or clones of Napster! [Applause for which there is no adequate adjective to describe its intensity so the noun-phrase 'American crowd' will just have to do] But heck, lets get on with the announcements. Now, I know that while my approach of modernising Apple has been successful, there are a few people who believe we've lost touch with our traditions. Well, we've found an ineffable piece of Appleness right at the core of our corporate being. Ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply honoured to tell you that... Mac OS X is gonna ship late! [Applause probably approaching that previously only heard in the Coliseum, when Maximus Flavius announced a special barbecuing of Christians and wild animals.] And even better, we're shipping late because we can't get a core piece of the technology to work. How Apple is that? The display PostScript routines just don't work fast enough. Not that that's important: it's only the one aspect of the new UI that everyone has picked up on. We thought we could get round it by pretending it wasn't really the crufty old PostScript routines from NeXT, and saying it was something to do with PDFs. But no: performance tanks. That's so exciting, because we're only going to be able to get it up to slow and embarrassing by January (rather than 'not working') and you'll all have to buy one of these! [Whips the cardboard box off and reveals a G4 with triple-chromed mufflers and a Big Daddy Ed Roth eyeball on the side.] We call it a hotrod. It's got two G4s running at 500MHz. And it just about plays the cute animated icons with only about a third dropped frames... What's that? Oh yeah: the other news. I'm running for President. Me and Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison have formed the Ayn-Rand-Positivist-Nice-Cars-From-Sweden party and, lets face it, as a trio we're so rich we're gonna win. So I'm going to be worrying about things like the Budget deficit by January, rather than getting a bunch of geeks an OS that doesn't crash when there's a perfectly good one out there they won't use 'cos it's not pretty enough. [Salute!] | ||||||
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