New and Noteworthy: A New Leaf for Apple?; Steve Jobs the Music Man; Re-ignition of the browser war?; more

A New Leaf for Apple? Matthew Rothenberg offers some speculation on what Apple will look like at the end of 2003: "Behind the scenes, I'm told, Apple is discussing how Panther will present new challenges to Windows XP in terms of interface features and (potentially) performance. At the same time, some hardware wonks at Apple have been privately predicting that new boxes shown at WWDC will close chronic performance gaps compared with Wintel boxes." More.

Re-ignition of the browser war? The Herald Tribune predicts another round of brwoser wars for the Macintosh platform: "Four years after Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer trounced Netscape in the Web browser wars, two new offerings for Macintosh computers offer the best evidence yet that market domination doesn't always make for the most nimble or innovative products. Apple Computer Inc.'s Safari and the Mozilla Organization's Camino are still in beta testing. But they leave Internet Explorer in the dust, rendering pages noticeably faster, dumping rarely used features and adding others not available in the Microsoft browser." More.

Steve Jobs the Music Man BusinessWeek adds input on recent speculation that Apple will begin an online music service: "The Music Store probably wouldn't make money at first -- and that might not matter. Analysts say licensing royalties are running at about 65 cents a song. Apple would have to cover another dime or so to pay for bandwidth, servers, and the staff to run them. While high marketing costs might lead to red ink in the short term, it would be well worth it so long as it helps stem further erosion of Apple's market share. It could also boost sales of the fast-selling iPod, which already has 50% of the portable jukebox market, says market researcher IDC." More.

New Keynote Themes Keynote Themes 2.0 now includes 10 high-quality themes for Apple's presentation software Keynote. New themes ("Black Table", "Grass" "Geography") and updated old themes ("Old Paper", "Photo Artist", "Network", "Wood", "Developer", "Valentine", "Simple") are available in both (1024x768 and 800x600) sizes. The downloadable (90Mb) version of Keynote Themes 2.0 is US$ 10. It is also available Keynote Themes 2.0 CD version which is US$ 25. More.

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