News 

April

Jon Rubinstein follows Avie Tevanian out of Apple's Cupertino front door only to return to the company in a consultancy role. Losing one key member of your executive team may be acceptable, but Apple clearly was not prepared to do without another key player in its renaissance.

Apple's latest music trademark spat with The Beatles' Apple Corps company reaches the UK high court where Neil Aspinall, head of the Beatles' Apple claims that Steve Jobs offered $1 million for the rights to the name Apple Records in order to avoid another dispute over who can use the name and for what.

If only the new Intel Macs could run Windows... Now they can, as Apple releases a public beta version of Boot Camp. Wall Street reacts by buying lots of Apple shares at a higher price. Good news for all those Apple employees with stock options, or perhaps not, we shall see.

The share price continues to rise as the company announces another set of healthy financial figures and says it is on track for another record year.

May

A good month for Apple's music business on two fronts. First the four major record companies sign new deals to sell their songs through iTunes without any of the concessions on pricing that they had been trying to secure. And second the company wins its legal battle with the Beatle's Apple - which promptly announces that it will appeal. But for the time being the Apple Computer logo will remain on the iTunes Store - although it may be some time before The Beatles make an appearance.

In an effort to persuade besuited middle-aged men that they would be cooler if they bought a Mac, Apple launched its Get A Mac advertising campaign. Buy one now and you may have time to clear your credit card in time to buy a copy of the Intel-compatible version of Quark 7, due next month.

And what better machine to buy than the new MacBook portable, in white or, for several pounds more, black. The desktop

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Power Mac is now all that remains of Apple's pre-Intel incarnation.

Apple Corps may be out of the way for the time being, but there is no rest for the wicked as Apple's lawyers receive a letter from their counterparts at Creative who allege that iPods breach four of the Singapore-based company's patents on media player menus. Apple's legal eagles fire back a counterclaim, alleging similar patent infringements.

Should Creative get its hands on a share of Apple's iPod pie, it should reap a cent or two from the new Nike+iPod kit, which beams running stats from your shoes direct to your CreativeMenu™ driven iPod screen.

June

An Adobe bigwig, marketing director EMEA Robert Raiola, lets slip that veteran Mac application FreeHand is on its last legs with the company focussing all its efforts on Illustrator. No-one is surprised, since FreeHand's demise was predicted as soon as the sale of, Macromedia, its former owner, to Adobe was announced. But Raiola's slip - if a slip it was - was minor in comparison to Samsung's boast last month that it had won a major iPod chip production contract from Apple. According to one analyst, Apple was so enraged that it stripped Samsung of a second iPod contract.

No Samsung chip for the revamped U2 iPod, which uses the tried-and-trusted hardware and red-and-black casing of its predecessor, albeit with more storage space and video playback support. It will also play songs bought online through iTunes, of course, but the UK music industry thinks that privilege should be open to all and calls on Apple to 'opt for interoperability' and license iTunes' DRM to other manufacturers.

U2's Bono is more likely to be concerned by a report in the Daily Mail alleging poor working conditions including long hours and low pay at an iPod manufacturing plant in China operated by a Taiwanese company, Foxconn. Apple immediately starts an investigation.

Having introduced Boot Camp to enable Windows to be run on a Mac, Apple must clearly be impressed by Parallels' virtualisation software for running Windows alongside OS X, since it is Parallel's Desktop that it recommends to potential switchers, not its own 'solution'. Which the employees at Apple's newly announced Kingston, Manchester Arndale Centre and Southampton stores will recommend remains to be seen.

Those employees may soon have a new boss, as Apple announces that it has discovered 'irregularities' in the granting of stock options, including options given to the Apple CEO. The company begins an investigation.