The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the flagship news program for PBS, has broadcast a story examining Apple. The show, which was first aired Friday, December 10th, looks at all the usual suspects for Apple’s current prospects, including the company’s success with the iTunes Music Store and iPod, as well as Apple’s market share in the computer business.
The segment was approximately 5 minutes long, and includes interviews with MacAddict editor Rik Myslewski, Apple VP Greg Joswiak, analyst Tim Bajarin, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser, and random Mac users, as well as others.
From the article:
For the past couple of decades, Apple and the Macintosh computers it makes have been objects of adoration by a relatively small band of longtime enthusiasts led by graphic designers like Dom Dimento, and photographers like Colette Cann, who need versatile, easy-to-use computers to manipulate images, something Apple pioneered.
But relatively few traditional businesses use Mac computers. Apple has less than 4 percent of the worldwide computer market, down dramatically from two decades ago.
Today, however, due increasingly to the popularity of its digital music player, the iPod, Apple appears to be comfortably surviving, perhaps even riding high less than a decade after its very existence was in doubt.
You can read the transcript at PBS’s Web site, watch the segment in Windows Media or Real Player format, or listen to it in RealAudio (links to which are at the top of the transcript).
The Mac Observer Spin:
The report makes one mistake, erroneously saying that the iPod was initially able to play only iTMS downloads, but was otherwise balanced. It also cast Apple in a largely positive light, and served to educate PBS watchers on Apple.
As with many of these end-of-year stories about Apple, there is little new information for most of those reading TMO, but the kind of exposure offered in the report is always a good thing.