Can you imagine what might have happened as Apple prepared to introduce its new music products last week? Just days before the event, someone knocks at the door of the CEO’s office and asks Steve Jobs to postpone the press briefing. “Why?” he growls, and he’s told that both the Mac and Windows versions of iTunes 5 have serious bugs and need further development. “Release it now and fix it later!” he screams, tossing a black iPod nano at his visitor and barely missing the head.

Now I wouldn’t want to suggest this actually happened. At the same time, I find it difficult to believe that Apple’s iTunes development team didn’t realize there were major problems with version 5. Alas, it doesn’t happen to everyone, but a check of the online chatter, at Apple’s own discussion boards and elsewhere, shows a fair number of troubling symptoms. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, with complaints about the failure of the iPod to mount, loss of Podcasts (this one is particularly irksome for those of us who produce such broadcasts), loss of purchased music, audio dropouts and other irritants. Windows users, who are actually responsible for more iTunes downloads than Mac users, moan about installation difficulties, the inability to recognize their iPods and so on and so forth.

Here it seems that Apple, in apparently releasing iTunes 5 prematurely, has managed to tick off iPod customers on both platforms. Talk about being an equal opportunity offender! The promised version 5.0.1, which supposedly fixes all or most of these bugs, appeared in Software Update, on Tuesday afternoon. In a few days, all of these ills will be history and you’ll get on with your digital lifestyle, until, of course, the next major iTunes upgrade appears. Then, will you approach it tentatively, choosing to let it simmer until others have a chance to take it through its paces, or will you just assume Apple learned its lesson about releasing products prematurely?

Let’s turn the clock back to the days prior to the introduction of the iMac G5. Now Apple was surely under severe pressure to rush release of the product after having to put up with late delivery of processor chips from IBM. Maybe it hurried the final Q&A process and failed to detect problems that would ultimately lead up to an extended warranty program to fix defective hardware. Now I would assume that Apple could have used the extra time waiting for delivery of parts to fine tune the product, and maybe it did. Maybe the problems that afflicted far too many owners of the first generation version weren’t anticipated or revealed during the quality control process. It happens, and maybe some of the components performed in ways that couldn’t be anticipated.

But you wonder!

And what about Tiger? Didn’t Apple realize that there would be problems with networking, particularly accessing remote corporate systems via VPN? Was it all the fault of third party providers who failed to update their products in time, or simply because problems Apple knew about just didn’t rise high enough on the radar to delay Tiger’s shipping date?

If you want to be cynical about it, of course, you could also assume that Apple needed to get that minor Power Mac G5 upgrade out the door, and they wanted to have it ship with Tiger preloaded. Could the company afford to lose potential sales by shipping it with Panther and providing complimentary 10.4 upgrade coupons with the first production batch? Maybe the new systems required something that only Tiger delivered, and Apple didn’t want to invest in another Panther update?

What about next year’s arrival of Macs with Intel, MacIntels, or whatever? Should you assume the first models will be virtually bug free, just regular Macs with a different processor inside? Or should you expect that Mac OS X for Intel will have unanticipated problems and you shouldn’t be an early adopter?

Now I suppose one should pay heed to the oft-heard recommendation that it’s never a good idea to buy a point-zero version of anything. Let others put up with the problems, and wait for the bug-fix or second generation product before diving in. I would hope, though, that Apple won’t continue to give us reason to avoid its products for the very same reason. Steve Jobs is supposed to be a perfectionist. He won’t allow the company he runs to release any new product until it meets his personal standards of quality, or at least, that’s what they say.

But where was Steve Jobs when iTunes 5 was declared Golden Master? Did he just look the other way, did he not want to embarrass himself and Apple by postponing that highly anticipated press briefing? Or none of the above? Inquiring minds want to know, but Apple will never tell.

Related Articles:

• Guess What: Macs Can Now Apply
• Apple Doesn’t Make Me-Too Products!
• So Where’s the Windows Only Label?
• Newsletter #469 Preview: Announcing the Night Owl’s Microsoft Death Watch
• Apple Always Finds a Way to Annoy Customers

I resisted using some variation of the theme “You’ve Got MSN” in the title, since someone else beat me to the punch. Or maybe great (or not-so-great) minds truly think alike.

But let’s take my inevitable journey through the pages of history.

It’s hard to believe in retrospect, but at one time AOL was primarily a Mac service, but that was a long, long time ago. In those days, CompuServe was king of the hill, and that was long before it became the poor stepsister to AOL. At first, AOL was intended to be a consumer version of AppleLinks, Apple Computer’s business-oriented online service. But that deal became unhinged, and AOL decided to go it alone. Oh yes, Apple did use AOL’s technology some years later in its failed attempt to create a new online service, eWorld.

I became a member of AOL back in 1989, and, for several years, actually worked for them as a paid forum manager. That was in the days when its Mac message boards were well populated and among the most popular watering holes on the service. Sad to say, things changed for the worse over the years, as AOL went after a much larger market. Today, Mac users justifiably feel they’re getting short shrift, since the Windows versions of its software gets far more attention.

In any case, I don’t think anyone at the time could have predicted that AOL chief Steve Case would leverage the dot-com boom and bloated financial valuations to accomplish the biggest land grab of all, the acquisition of Time Warner. Of course, Case is yesterday’s news, apparently hanging out somewhere counting his billions, and the folks at Time Warner are trying to figure out what to do with its AOL division, which has been hemorrhaging members in droves. Yes, it’s profitable, and all that. But as broadband spreads across the land, you have to wonder why anyone would still pay AOL’s exorbitant dial-up rates, but they do. AOL is a comfort zone for millions, and its parental controls are still powerful enough to ensure a fairly safe environment for your kids, or as safe as any online environment can be these days.

Over the years, AOL has had a love/hate relationship with Microsoft. While competing with MSN, it licensed Internet Explorer early on when its ability to build its own browser had pathetic results. Of course, that was before AOL acquired Netscape, and you wonder why a Mozilla-based browser doesn’t dominate, but stranger things have happened. By the way, the Mac version of AOL, such as it is, does employ a Mozilla browser engine.

In any case, the latest rumors about AOL are nearly as strange as the news that it planned to acquire Time Warner several years ago. According to a story in the New York Post, not a paragon of journalistic integrity mind you, Time Warner is in talks to sell part of its stake in AOL to Microsoft. The end result wouldn’t necessarily mean a merger between AOL and MSN. It would reportedly involve AOL switching from Google for its search technology to MSN.

Now, as we all know, Microsoft’s biggest enemy these days is Google, so anything it can do to get a leg up on the search upstart would be a huge feather in the cap of Bill Gates. Even more significant than ego satisfaction is the another story, this time in the Wall Street Journal, that Google earns more revenue from AOL than any other single customer. If AOL gets in bed with Microsoft, Google would take one huge financial hit as would, no doubt, that $300 stock price.

Of course, such a deal is by no means certain and it would still have to be approved by the Department of Justice. And if it doesn’t come to pass, AOL might consider casting its lot with Yahoo and perhaps even Google.

Understand that all this talk is speculative. Officially, Time Warner and Microsoft aren’t commenting. Of course, I can see where Microsoft’s executives would have a sincere desire to make such a deal happen, and Time Warner executives no doubt are still smarting from being snookered into a merger by a mere online service.

Looking down the road, I suspect AOL’s future as an online service may seem somewhat uncertain, though with nearly 21 million members, it’s not going to go away. At least not yet.

Related Articles:

• So Where’s the Windows Only Label?
• Apple and the 50% Factor
• Newsletter #458 Preview: Twenty-Four Years Using Macs
• The WWDC Report #2: Is MobileMe a Big Letdown?
• The Illusion of the Cheap Mac

For years, the conventional wisdom had it that Apple’s products were priced way too high, and, sure enough, when the first iPod hit the streets nearly four years ago, that was complaint number one. Who’d pay $399 for a tiny digital music player with a 5GB hard drive? Is this just another Apple Newton, a product that cost a lot to develop, but will never realize its potential?

Of course, as iPod sales soared and the product became a cultural icon, you still heard complaints. Whenever the “iPod killer of the week” was examined, you just knew it was cheaper, more feature-laden. Apple’s fifteen minutes of fame were just about over, and it was high time for the next great thing to take its place. More to the point, the tight integration of the iTunes Music Store and the iPod was more evidence of the same obsessive/compulsive control over the platform that left the Mac a niche computer. Apple was just making the same old mistake all over again. Hadn’t Steve Jobs learned from his experiences?

But what about the price? Well, strange as it seems, or at least strange for an Apple product, when it comes to Flash-based players, the iPod is downright cheap. Now paying $249 for a 4GB iPod nano may not seem like a bargain. After all, for another $50, you can get a standard-sized version with a hard drive with a capacity of 20GB. But Flash memory is still downright expensive, even though it’s a lot less expensive than it used to be. While some are even predicting its eventual replacement of hard drives, that appears to be years away, unless some incredible new discovery boosts capacity way beyond predicted levels.

Now take a look at the competition for the nano. Now remember, we’re talking about not just the capacity, but the color screen and the ability to display photos. Now Mathew Honan at Playlist did a comparison of the nano and other so-called “micro” players, and the results are, to put it mildly, illuminating.

The competitor with the largest capacity is, and this is a name that won’t easily flow from your tongue, the Sony Network Walkman Digital Music Player NW-e505. Say that five times rapidly. It has a storage capacity of just 2GB, a monochrome screen, and sells for $290. In terms of storage capacity, its the closest competitor. Sony ought to give out discounts for people who remember that tongue-twisting name.

So how has Apple wrought this miracle? Well, the stories have it that they secured a large amount of Samsung’s Flash memory production at a bargain price, and they are taking advantage of the deal. I’ve read an estimate, in fact, that the $249 iPod nano contains spare parts costing, as I recall, $180 (feel free to correct me!). Now, if true, it would mean that Apple may even be taking a short term loss on the nano just to build market share, but I don’t believe it. Apple doesn’t sell anything without a reasonable profit margin.

In any case, the nano still isn’t exactly cheap even if the competition offers less bang for the buck. So how is Apple’s “impossibly small” member of the iPod family doing in the market place? That is one large question. One survey showed decent, but not stellar demand. Another calls it “strong” and predicts Apple will sell a ton of them. I suppose the analysts must believe that if an Apple store doesn’t move its allotment in an hour, flat, the product must be a failure.

If you examine the results at Amazon.com, you’ll find Apple continues to dominate the top five spots among Flash-based models, although the figures change hourly. And the Black nano seems to be the hottest seller in that model line. Over at Apple’s online store, the nano is listed as the top seller. The waiting time for the 4GB versions, both white and black, has slipped to five to seven days, meaning stocks are low. Now the cynics might just suggest Apple is cooking its numbers, because it wants to make middling sales seem spectacular.

At the same time, it does appear that the mini’s luster hasn’t diminished much, even though it’s now yesterday’s news. Folks are apparently still rushing to get closeout deals.

The real facts about Apple’s great risk in discontinuing its most popular iPod probably won’t be apparent until the sales figures are unleashed when Apple releases its quarterly financials in October. I’m not a betting man, as I’ve often said, but I’m willing to suggest that the iPod will remain unstoppable, and that you’ll soon see, or not see since its so small, lots of white earbuds attached to nanos in the days to come.

In any case, I hope to have my review of the iPod nano ready real soon now.

Related Articles:

• The Apple Beating the Odds Column
• Apple Doesn’t Make Me-Too Products!
• Newsletter #469 Preview: Announcing the Night Owl’s Microsoft Death Watch
• Will Snow Leopard Arrive with the Snow?
• Can Apple Withstand the Recession?