BEING IN THE MIDST OF A HOLIDAY, not much has happened since the "Hard(er) Times at Apple" post, but in order to keep readers up to date, worth maintaining track of are these technical issues which brick Apple Macs. This is pretty serious.

As PC Mag reported last week, Apple OS X 10.5.6 can break some MacBook Pros leaving some users (like me) with a dead backlit black screen after the Apple logo appears.

Apple's enormous marketing budget (about $300M per year) will probably send this one "oopsie" under the shade

It is saddening to see OS News turning a mere rumour into the headline "Jobs' Health Rapidly Declining, Inevitable News Spring 2009." A more accurate report is probably this one.

Apple's stock fell abruptly on Tuesday, but later recovered some ground, after an online report said CEO Steve Jobs bowed out of next week's Macworld Expo keynote address because of declining health.

In a report it labeled "rumor," the gadget blog Gizmodo quoted an unnamed source as saying Apple "is choosing to remove the hype factor strategically" by holding the keynote without Jobs, whose "health is rapidly declining." Gizmodo said the source had been correct in the past, though only about Apple products and not about Jobs. Apple did not comment for the Gizmodo post and did not immediately respond to IDG News Service requests for comment.

It is worth remembering that Apple is not invincible. It spends outrageous amounts of money on shaping perceptions, so it's too easy to be deceived. Apple is not exactly a friend of Free software, to say the very least. Its people also fail to acknowledge their 'debt' to ideas which come from the software community but are never mass marketed. ⬆

"Hey, Steve, just because you broke into Xerox’s store before I did and took the TV doesn’t mean I can’t go in later and steal the stereo."

--Bill Gates, Microsoft

"Our friends up north [Microsoft] spend over five billion dollars on research and development and all they seem to do is copy Google and Apple."

--Steve Jobs, Apple