Apple Computer is healthy and here to stay, interim CEO Steve Jobs said at the Seybold Web publishing conference on Tuesday.
The charismatic founder of the revived computer company told a crowd of about 1,000 that a slew of new products is the works, including a portable computer for consumers due out in the first half of next year.
"Apple has the financial health it really needs to make investments for tomorrow," said Jobs. "Everybody knows Apple will be here for the next decade."
Apple (AAPL) has long suffered a loss in market share, due to the proliferation of cheap PCs and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows operating system. But reduced costs and hot-selling new products have helped the company report better-than-expected earnings for the past few quarters.
Jobs told the audience of publishing professionals -- once Apple's most ardent fans -- that the Macintosh is still viable and the premier machine for their line of work.
"The combination of Apple's new products and outstanding design and publishing applications from Macintosh developers firmly underscores Macintosh's place at the heart of the publishing industry," said Jobs, dressed in his trademark jeans, sneakers, and black T-shirt.
Jobs called the MacOS 8.5 a "must-have upgrade," and said Apple is investing "a ton" of resources in the operating system, due out in October. The classic MacOS was to have been supplanted in the next few years by Rhapsody, a new operating system based on Next Software technology. But Apple reversed course earlier this year and decided to continue developing the MacOS, sprinkling bits of Rhapsody technology into the forthcoming OSX (for "OS 10") release, which is due in about a year, according to Jobs.
"We realized a year ago that we were the owners and caretakers of one of only two high-volume operating systems in the world," said Jobs. "The MacOS was in many regards way ahead of the competition and ... we should invest in it."
Jobs demonstrated "Sherlock," a feature in OS 8.5 that searches the Net using all search engines without a browser. It can conduct natural language or keyword searches and save the results as documents, conduct content-based file searches, search on local hard drives, and provide two-paragraph summaries of documents.
ColorSync -– an improved feature in OS 8.5 that ensures color matching between printers, scanners, and computers -- has more than 1 million users, said Jobs. Apple will let the product work with other platforms some time next year.
On the hardware side, Apple will release a "consumer" laptop some time next year, according to Jobs. He did not elaborate.
Jobs played up to Apple's developers by showing "the three most popular publishing apps in the world today running on OSX -- Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Freehand, and QuarkXPress." In another cheerleading move, Jobs then brought onstage the respective chiefs of the software companies to praise both Apple and OSX.
For Jobs' grand finale, a preview of Adobe's new page layout product -– code-named K2 -– was shown. The new program allows more complex image manipulation, such as continuous editing of outlines and the graphics that fill them, and multiple views of text as it is filled into a layout on different pages. Jobs said the Adobe product will be out "hopefully some time soon."
Jobs was asked when a complete Apple turnaround would be reached. His response: "Our goal isn't to turn Apple around. Our goal is to make the best computers and the best software in the world." He added that "a turnaround is one milestone on a long road."
Apple's stock closed up US$3.62 at $34.25.
