Apple scores a profit. And this may be only the beginning.
Apple scored a $14 million profit for the quarter. In a slow tech economy, it shows Apple still has a strong market viability--people still want their products.
The rumor mills have been swelling with pulp lately. Of these bits of flotsam include the rumor that IBM has given the go-ahead to mass produce the new PowerPC 970 chip. Strongly rumored as the G4 PowerPC chip's successor, the 970 is a 64-bit processor with essentially dual processors and AltiVec subprocessor with none of the bottlenecks found in previous chips. Moving Mac OS X to 64-bit support doesn't appear to faze Apple, and prototype logic boards have already been tested. In fact, it appears that Apple has already tapped an Asian company to begin work on production of these new boards.
Since Apple is no longer tied its production plans and hype machine with the former Macworld Expo in July (now a Seybold-replacement named "Create"), they may feel less pressure to get this new configuration out of the door. However, I suspect that attendees of the Worldwide Developers Conference, which Apple holds annually for its coders, will be awash with NDAs as they view not only the new 970 configurations, but also Mac OS 10.3, of which speculation abounds as to its features.
Good news throughout, if Apple can fit the pieces together and add that special polish they are known for that could make all this much more than just a new OS upgrade and new chip.
7:18:47 AM 
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