Apple computer help

Life in Hollywood, if I may paraphrase flavour-of-the-month Roberto Benigni, is beautiful. Apple "interim" CEO Steve Jobs is more than aware of that fact. After his stunning success with Toy Story and A Bug's Life, the man pulling the strings at both Pixar (which made the movies) and Apple realizes the power of the silver screen.

That power has led more than five million people to Apple. No, it's not the result of a cunning but anachronistic product placement in Shakespeare in Love. It's a more natural tie-in. You see, people were buying tickets to such soul-destroying bombs as Meet Joe Black simply because of a rumour that it was playing with a trailer. A trailer! And just because Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was playing along with it.

Apparently droves of people were shelling out, watching the ad and then leaving before the feature began. It got to the point where cinema owners were playing the trailer before and after movies in hopes that people would stay through the whole thing. Now that's brand loyalty even Apple would give up a kidney for.

So Jobs, who bought Pixar from Star Wars producer/director George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, hooks up with his old pal and gets an exclusive. The only way to view the new, improved Phantom Menace trailer on a PC is with Apple's QuickTime multimedia software.

Brilliant. If there's one thing Apple has been doing consistently wrong is that it spends all it's time preaching to the converted (I already own three of them, what more do they expect?). Forcing Windows users to use Apple software to get the Star Wars fix they desperately need is pure genius. Not only do they get to see how much better QuickTime works than what Windows is currently offering (Direct-X - direct crap is more like it), but they are forced to visit Apple's very alluring Web site to get it.

Big deal, you say? Well, over five million people have downloaded the trailer. If just one per cent of them decide to switch to Apple . . . well, that's a lot of gravy for Mac resellers.

Ah, but Jobs isn't satisfied just with Hollywood, he wants small town North America as well. The mainstreaming of the Mac has just begun. Rumour has it (and it's persistent enough that it's hard not to believe) that Sears will start selling the Mac. Good and bad for you.

Yes, that addition of 1,550 stores will no doubt raise consumer consciousness and confidence, but it also adds 1,550 competitors. Resellers have lived through worse and it's better to have Sears' marketing might touting your product than somebody else's.

Add to that the OS X server - uniting Mac architecture and Unix concepts against NT - and the 300 MHz G3 which arrives next month and you can see that the iMac/G3 wasn't Apple's big thing - just the opening salvo of the latest Mac revolution.

Jerry Langton lives in New York City. He is an expatriate Canadian, and a veteran Mac user. We welcome your feedback. Please send your comments and questions to cdnedit@plesman.com or write to the author directly at buckley@webspan.net.