Everyone knows Steve Jobs is a consummate showman; in fact, we have our own pet theory that involves the earthly remains of P. T. Barnum and an advanced cloning technique years ahead of what the general public believes to be currently possible. Whether you buy that or not, you have to acknowledge that Steve knows how to manipulate the opinions of the media and the public like a virtuoso. In fact, before he returned, Apple as a whole was pitifully weak in the whole public relations area, which was a big part of the whole death spiral thing; now, instead of seeing the company as a dying dinosaur killing time in its last days, people see Apple as an innovative underdog who makes computers that are easy to use and cool to look at. Quite a coup.

So is it really any surprise that Uncle Steve has managed to align Apple with what may well be the biggest upcoming movie event of the decade? The fifteen-year wait for a new Star Wars movie finally ends this May when Episode I: The Phantom Menace is released. Many theaters started selling advance tickets months ago for the first showings, and quickly sold out. People who were desperate to see the trailer for the new film and heard that it was being shown before and after Meet Joe Black actually bought tickets to the Brad Pitt-a-thon, watched the Phantom Menace trailer, adjourned to the lobby to discuss how cool it was for an hour and a half, and then went back into the theater to watch the trailer a second time. Evidently Steve heard about all this hoopla and realized that getting Apple in on that action would be a Good Thing™. It was at this point that we assume he made some calls...

And, voilà: the Internet premiere of the second Phantom Menace trailer took place jointly at the Star Wars site and at an Apple web page, available only in QuickTime format. As faithful viewer Brian Hall points out, you don't want to miss what's at the Star Wars page, since it includes some interesting stuff not available at the Apple page-- namely, a photo of an engineer hard at work in front of two "icebox" G3's and some Apple-polishing quotes from Lucasfilm's Director of Marketing about how "George Lucas wanted to create the highest-quality Internet viewing experience for [the] trailer, so [they] turned to QuickTime because it sets the standard for Internet video quality." And, of course, Steve himself pipes in, noting that the new trailer isn't available to "Real Networks' Real Player" or "Microsoft's Media Player," but only on QuickTime. Let's see-- Apple rides the coattails of one of the biggest movie events in history, grabbing consumer moviegoing eyes and the attention of both the media and the entertainment industry only a month before the expected unveiling of QuickTime 4 at the National Association of Broadcasters convention. Is that a master stroke, or what?

We admit, we often worry far too much about issues that don't always directly affect us. Our concern over the relative performance of the iMac in the retail marketplace occasionally borders on the obsessive, despite the fact that whether the round translucent wonder is first or fortieth on the charts really shouldn't weigh very heavily on our minds. After all, such things make no difference at all to real issues in our day-to-day lives, such as how long it takes to get to work or what we can have for breakfast. (Not that a fruit-flavored sugary breakfast cereal consisting of crunchy little iMacs wouldn't be very welcome at our breakfast table. By the way, is anyone else absolutely thrilled that Quisp is back on the market?)

Still, we admit, we weren't very happy with the iMac's ranking in January sales, as posted by PC Data. If you recall, they stated that the Bondi Blue iMacs dropped from third place to fourth, while the five fruit-flavored iMacs combined didn't even crack the top fifteen. It did in fact seem possible that the iMac was a passing fad whose novelty had worn off, as the fickle multitudes spent their money on Compaq boxes instead. That's why we're tickled pink that longtime faithful viewer Avi Rappoport pointed us towards a ZDNN article with the très cool title, "iMac sales defy gravity." Well, they do kinda look like happy round helium balloons, after all...

Anyway, the gist of the article is that ZD Market Intelligence had completed their own study of last January's iMac numbers, and they conclude that sales of the world's first truly cute computer "are trucking along." According to them, iMacs accounted for a very respectable 6.6% of retail computer sales. Amazingly enough, that's as high a sales percentage as back when the iMac first debuted last August, if you can recall that particular feeding frenzy. So apparently the iMac is still holding its own-- or, at least it was back to kicking butt in January. It just goes to show that overall sales percentages are more important than sales rankings, since what matters is how many people bought iMacs instead of those "other things," not whether the "other things" consist of a single hot seller or three or four or forty.

For those of you who feel that sorting out the muddled and conflicting rumors about Apple's upcoming consumer portable (code-named "P1" and expected to be marketed under the name "WebMate") no longer offers enough of a challenge, perhaps it's time to move on to even more inscrutable subjects of conjecture. How about the MacMate, Apple's supposed PDA that they promised us way back when they finally nailed the Newton's coffin shut? Heck, we don't even really know that it'll be called the MacMate, but that's what most rumors seem to indicate-- and unlike just about every other project ever worked on inside Apple's walls, nobody seems to know the code name of this PDA.

Anyway, what we don't know about the MacMate could fill Albert Hall and we'd still have enough left over to use as cheap packing material for the next million or so PowerBooks rolling off the lines. For a long time it was rumored that the MacMate would run some slimmed-down version of the Mac OS, referred to by most as "Mac OS Lite;" we're pretty sure that even Apple indicated it would be Mac OS-based way back when. But then there was that news that Steve Jobs tried to buy the Palm Pilot from 3Com, and since that failed, Apple and Palm seem to have gotten pretty buddy-buddy in the PR sense. Palm's released that cool Claris Organizer-based MacPac 2, and Apple's been pushing the Palm on its website for quite a while. That's led many to believe that the MacMate will simply be an Apple-cobranded Palm unit, perhaps with some nice Newton-salvaged extensions like true handwriting recognition. So which is it-- Palm OS, or Mac OS Lite?

According to O'Grady's PowerPage, not even Apple is quite sure of that yet. Reportedly, Apple's treading two paths to see which one gets them to a happier place. One road involves negotiating an OEM license from Palm, which would let them build and ship Palm OS-based MacMates. The other choice is to use Mac OS Lite, which seems really to exist and which may or may not be a "redesigned version of the Newton OS." Whichever they pick, we hope they choose well, choose soon, and ship a true Apple PDA before our beloved but crusty MessagePad 100 crumbles into rubberized dust.