After a lapse of several years, Apple has finally released what is clearly meant to be the replacement for AppleWorks. As rumors arose over the form it would take, some suggested Apple planned to go up against Microsoft and come out with a product that competed directly with Office.

So let me get something out of the way before I go any further: Pages, part of Apple’s new iWork ‘05 collection, is not a Microsoft Word killer, and doesn’t pretend to be. Along with Keynote 2.0, it only replaces a portion of AppleWorks, since it lacks database, drawing and spreadsheet capability. Perhaps those components will appear in later revisions, but it also means you’re forced to stick with AppleWorks if you’ve created documents using those features. What’s more, AppleWorks, for now at least, continues to be bundled with new consumer Macs, including the Mac mini. You want iWork, prepare to spend $79.

At first glance, Pages appears to be a serviceable low-end word processor, but prepare to be amazed.

The startup screen layout, a graphical list of available templates which matches the one in Keynote, strikes you as nothing more than a prettier version of the Starting Points feature of AppleWorks. On further glance, though, it seems a little closer in appearance to the Project Gallery in Office. Now isn’t that interesting?

Before you begin, you can choose a template for your document, or just a blank page. The spare Preferences dialog lets you limit yourself to the blank page, and that’s a good place to begin if you just want to write a letter or perhaps a manuscript for a book or article. Or perhaps you’re one of those folks who’d rather build a complicated document from scratch.

Like the Project Gallery, the templates in Pages are divided into categories, such as newsletters, invitations and resumes. As you explore the nooks and crannies of Pages, you quickly come to the conclusion that it’s also designed to be a simple page layout tool. It’s even somewhat reminiscent of PageMaker, because you can easily drag and drop graphics onto a blank page. If you want to create a complex document, you’ll want to take advantage of those templates. All you need to do is replace the existing graphics and photos with your own, and enter your text. Your customized templates, by the way, can also be added to the listing.

You can do your text formatting via the menu, or, better yet, open an Inspector window, which also strikes you as similar to Word’s formatting palette, except for the icons above the palette for instant access to the various categories of document creation, such as layout, text, charts and tables. In that respect, it actually resembles FreeHand. For convenience, or if you prefer a crowded workspace, you can open multiple Inspectors.

The text tools in Pages are actually quite powerful. Like the professional grade page layout applications, such as QuarkXPress, you have automatic hyphenation and ligatures. But the hyphenation thresholds can’t be adjusted, so you’ll have to pour through your document for mistakes. You can also add headers, footers, footnotes, a table of contents, a bookmark and a hyperlink. Like Word, you can create automatic bulleted and numbered lists.

The tables tool has more bells and whistles than the bare-bones version you find in AppleWorks. The most interesting features include the ability to split and merge cells, insert automatic headers and to allow tables to resize to fit content. You can also create charts in a variety of formats, such as columns, bars, line, area and pie. Creating one of these elements is remarkably easy. Just click the Objects icon on a documents toolbar and choose whether you want to create an object containing a shape, a table or a chart. You’ll figure out the rest without having to consult the Help menu.

Of these, the shape feature is the most limited. There is no bezier tool, so you’re stuck with the standard range of shapes and arrows. It would have been nice to incorporate more of the features of the drawing module in AppleWorks. Now whether it’s one of these objects, or a separate graphic or photo element, text wrapping is swift and automatic. Move a picture here, and the text flows one way, move it there and it flows differently. The Wrap icon on the toolbar lets you choose whether you want the text to wrap around the object, or above and below it.

Pages also sports decent integration with the iLife suite, with still another palette, a Media Browser, which lets you navigate the contents of your iPhoto and iTunes libraries and your Movie folder. When you find what you want, just drag it to your page. As you can gather, a Pages document can also be rich with multimedia, embedded with both audio and video elements.

So how does all this add up? A lot better than you dared expect. The learning curve is very simple. Just spend a few moments looking over the Inspector palette and the various menu commands and everything should fall into place. If you want to master Pages the old fashioned way, you’ll find a 191-page user’s guide inside the box. It’s smaller than most manuals, measuring 5-1/2 by 6-1/2 inches, and it appears the text was reduced accordingly. If you’re a little over 21, make sure you have a pair of reading glasses handy.

In the end, I am quite impressed with Pages. As a word processor, you’ll find all the features you need front and center, and none of the complicated stuff that clogs Word. You can even open Word documents and save in Word format, and it works pretty well, except for the lack of support for Track Changes. That, by the way, is the Word feature that allows writers and editors to keep tabs on the progress of a manuscript.

As a page layout tool, it won’t replace Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, but it does a dandy job on a brochure for that garage sale, or a newsletter for a club or religious institution.

For a version 1.0 release, Pages is remarkably stable. Performance on my PowerMac G5 was quite good, with text and picture movements swift and sure, without any noticeable stuttering. System requirements are a mite stiff for a consumer-oriented application, however. Apple specifies a 500MHz G3 or faster with 128MB of RAM, but 512MB is recommended, so you can see where it might bog down on lesser hardware. You’ll also need Mac OS X 10.3.6 or later and a DVD drive for the installation disc. Apple does have a CD available, but you have to order it separately.

Along with Keynote 2.0, a decent upgrade to Apple’s presentation software, iWork ‘05 is well worth the $79 price of admission. I just wonder whether we’ll see database and spreadsheet applications in the next version. If Apple goes there, how many of you will truly want to continue to rely on Microsoft Office, assuming the spreadsheet program is compatible with Excel, of course. Or maybe this is one border Apple is not yet prepared to cross.

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Someone once said that all they knew was what they read in the newspapers. I suppose one could substitute the words broadcasting and online these days and come to the same conclusion. In any case, if you pay any attention at all to articles about personal computers, you’d have to think Apple is number one in the business. Nearly every new Mac gets rave reviews even from publications that specialize in Windows PCs. Where criticisms appear, they are relatively minor in the scheme of things, such as not enough memory as standard equipment.

Throughout my workday, I regularly consult online information sources. To make the quest easier, I keep an RSS reader, NetNewsWire Lite, open and ready to deliver the latest headlines from dozens of sites. These days, I see more and more members of the mainstream press putting Apple on a pedestal, separate and better from the rest of the PC universe. It has grown to a fever pitch since Macworld Expo, just as Apple’s stock price goes higher and higher. If only I invested, but again that would be a conflict of interest for any journalist, right? Well, maybe I could put it in a blind trust, but I’m probably too late even if I had enough money to take a chance.

In fact, one might think there is only one kind of PC, and it’s made by Apple. Of course, when it comes to digital music players, that would be the correct answer for the most part. Online music? Whatever happened to MSN Music? They said that Microsoft would be unbeatable, but you don’t hear about it anymore. Maybe the company is too busy trying to get a crippled Longhorn out the door and fight security threats. So it simply doesn’t have the resources to give much attention to an online music service.

Yet it seems so strange that Apple sits there with a tiny share of the computer market. Isn’t anyone paying attention?

I sometimes wonder how a visitor from another planet might react to the situation. The creature, humanoid or otherwise, would learn our language, and probably use the news media to discover something about our civilization. I suppose the warlike race of which we are all a part wouldn’t be terribly impressive to highly advanced beings from out there, but that’s another subject.

In any case, the alien visitor, knowing nothing about the state of the PC market, would quickly come to the conclusion that Apple has a 90% share. How could it be otherwise with all that great publicity? Imagine how that being would react if it were in attendance at a Steve Jobs keynote address. I assume here, of course, that the being is human-like or can masquerade as one. Maybe that person sitting next to me? No, that was Grayson and I definitely know his history.

Would the famous “reality distortion field” extend to an extraterrestrial visitor? It sure effects most everybody who attends one of those sessions. This year, more and more members of the media were in attendance; so many in fact that many had to observe the proceedings via a pair of high definition TV monitors in a separate room. But, from what my colleagues who were placed in that room tell me, the charisma was just as powerful.

The news media is supposed to deliver information for the benefit of the rest of the public, but it almost seems as we are all alien visitors when it comes to putting an accurate spin on the situation. The reality, of course, is that Apple’s sales are dwarfed by makers of dull, drag, almost anonymous computing boxes from Dell, HP, Gateway and so on. Apple is doing a little better, but the reality and the perception just don’t jibe.

I wonder what an IT person must think reading about all the great stuff from Apple, how Mac OS X isn’t affected by spyware, how the only Mac viruses discovered so far amount to proofs of concept. That means there’s a potential for infection, but it hasn’t happened. Even in the days when Apple really had a double digit market share, the number of virus infections were relatively small. Stability? Not perfect, but far better than Windows.

The IT people must know that unless they are living in another universe. They must read the same news we do, and yet how many of them will tell their employers to ditch those troublesome PC boxes and by something that usually “just works”? To them, Apple Computer remains an irrelevant boutique brand that really doesn’t build computers designed for business. Well, maybe those crazy people in the art department. But aren’t creative folks eccentric anyway?

Hollywood? The music industry? They live in bubbles, shielded from reality, so their computers of choice don’t impact normal people. But wouldn’t you consider USA Today and The Wall Street Journal normal? What about The New York Times and The Washington Post? All right, some might dismiss them as the so-called left-wing press (as if there’s anything wrong with that), but what about the popular conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh? Or The Washington Times for that matter, which is also regarded as having a conservative bent.

Hello! Is anyone paying attention out there? The publicity about Microsoft and its operating system is either neutral or bad. Apple delivers gushes, even from folks who are supposedly objective. Does it mean that the reality distortion field has finally extended its influence beyond the confines of the Macworld Expo? If that’s true, you’d have to believe it’s only a matter of time before the message gets through and millions and millions of new Macs find their way into homes and offices just as huge numbers of PC boxes are shuffled on to the recycle bins. It has to happen soon, right? Or maybe we are the real alien visitors after all.

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Up until that rumor explosion in December, some things were absolutely certain about Apple. For one thing, Steve Jobs would never allow the company to sell a cheap Mac or a cheap iPod. There was no profit in it, and it was better to get large profit margins and remain a boutique computer company. This belief was so ingrained in some quarters that folks who dared disagree were labeled as “deluded.”

Through it all, there was the ever-present tendency to first throw cold water on a possible product, then eventually find a way to produce it. The ultra thin form factor of the iMac G5 is a telling example. When Jobs first introduced the flower pot version of a flat panel iMac, he said that the possibility of putting the computer within an LCD display was discarded. Just too plain ugly. But never say never.

But let’s go back even further. Do you recall the Cube? At the time, I wrote that its stunning looks made it suitable for a museum, and I would facetiously quote a similar line from an old Indiana Jones movie. I recall a press briefing at Apple headquarters when Jobs was asked to comment on the possibility the Cube would soon be discontinued. Jobs shot back “You don’t know what you’re talking about” in his inimitable style. It wasn’t very long after that when he threw in the towel, realized the Cube wouldn’t never be a true sales success and discontinued that model.

Today, folks cherish their Cubes, and some suggest that the basic form factor of the Mac mini is little more than a slimmed down Cube. Apple just continued to work on the concept till it got it right, and I think the mini is probably what the Cube should have been all along, a cheap no-frills personal computer that had all the basic elements that made a Mac a Mac. In creating its first sub-$500 model, Apple found a way to ignore its own advice and deliver a compelling product. There was also an opening, at long last, that revealed the possibility of gaining market share for once as more and more PC users became disgusted with spyware, virus infections and all the rest of the ills that plague the Windows world.

Sure enough, the Mac mini, like the iPod mini a year ago, is back ordered for weeks, and the folks who managed to acquire one when it officially went on sale last weekend are just plain lucky. The iPod shuffle? Forget about it.

Now about that Shuffle, when the iPod mini was first unveiled, Jobs sharply attacked the concept of a Flash-based model. Wouldn’t work, not enough capacity, and, besides, people would just toss them in the closet after realizing how impractical they truly were. What happened? Flash memory became cheaper, and the stunning success of the hard drive-based models made Apple strike while the iron was hot. And speaking of movie quotes, remember the unforgettable comment that “greed is good”?

The first reviews of the Mac mini actually disputed the low price factor, suggesting that once you optioned it up with a decent keyboard, mouse and monitor, it would still cost a lot more than a low-end PC. But if you actually visited a PC retailer, you’d see input devices for $10 each or even less, and monitors priced below $100. So the price of admission wasn’t so great after all. And let’s not forget about all the stuff left over when you toss out your malware-ridden PC box.

Now about the cost of those options: Apple quickly cut the price of its Pro keyboard and mouse to $29 each, and shaved $10 from the price of its wireless variations. And, without fanfare, the price of official Apple RAM and wireless networking upgrades went down. You want to max out at 1GB of RAM? The original price of $425 seemed a bit much, so Apple cut it to $325. You could still do better on the open market, where prices would dip to $199 and perhaps even less, but for Apple this is a pretty drastic price reduction. In fact, it’s downright aggressive in the scheme of things.

But that’s not all: The cost of adding Bluetooth and Wi-Fi decreased from $129 to $99. The $100 SuperDrive upgrade will provide an 8x drive, twice as fast as the one first announced; unfortunately the specs have since reverted to 4x, but it was nice while it lasted. You want to upgrade from 40GB to 80GB? It’s just $50.

One more thing: If you never ventured beyond the bundled software, or similar products, the stock 256MB of RAM was probably enough for decent performance. Even adding Microsoft Office wouldn’t drag it down, so long as you avoided large files. It’s fun to toss conventional wisdom on its ear, but I still go for more RAM every time despite the benchmarks. In addition, it seemed at first that the closed box form factor of the Mac mini precluded easy RAM upgrades. But Mac users quickly discovered that a thin putty knife, and some extra care in using it, made the process a little awkward but not all that hard. In fact, that’s how Apple does it. I can just imagine Steve Jobs asking his product design people how to open the thing, and staring with astonishment as they pulled out their putty knives and went to work.

Just how many Mac minis can Apple shove out the door? Well, if the folks disappointed by the non-availability of the iPod shuffle want to add another hard-to-get model to their shopping list, you can see where it’s all going. This is not to say you can’t find a mini. I expect you can get one fairly quickly if you shop around. I’ve seen Mac mail order houses quoting three to five days for delivery and even less. Of course, things change rapidly, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those estimates prove to be strictly come-on’s to get your order. Once you place yours, you’ll probably get a letter suggesting that they ran out of stock just five minutes before your order was received. Or maybe not.

I’m really curious to see what products Apple will produce in 2005 that it originally said wouldn’t or couldn’t be done. An iPod video anyone? What about that PowerBook G5? Maybe cooling the thing presents the “mother” of all obstacles, but don’t think for a moment that it’s not going to happen.

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