Apple gives us a glimpse of things to come

Wired on Friday: As Mike Evangelist (apparently his real name) commented in his fascinating tell-all confessional regarding Steve Jobs' keynotes in the Guardian last week, it's amazing Apple's product presentations get any notice at all.

The company is about the size of Nike or Marks and Spencers, but we don't get front page headlines or columns with analysis on the latest range of trainers or underpants.

Mike puts it down to Jobs' razzmatazz. Perhaps a little more defensive of my own regular gullibility and column inches on Apple, I'd put it down to Jobs' poker-faced ability to turn a terrible hand into a winning combination.

Watching him do so live on stage gives you occasional lightning-flash glimpses into the future of not only Apple, but the industry as a whole - and, given the importance of computers to modern culture, the potholes and the prospects that face us all.

Not being too overdramatic about it, the clues from this month's keynote are a little grim - not for Apple, perhaps, but certainly for the rest of us.

The big news was the move to switch the Apple Mac line over to Intel, the same processor as found inside Windows' PCs, has begun. Such a shimmy was a move historically regarded as advisable, but too embarrassing for Apple to successfully manage.

Yet somehow Jobs' reality distortion field won again. Consumers who were convinced their Macs were incomparably faster than their then Intel competition are now equally excited to find that the upgrades to Intel will be two to four times speedier. The logical fallacy has been waved away.

A marketing success, then, for Apple. But a tougher technical ride lies ahead - and they may make need to make a pact with the devil.

Apple makes their money, by and large, on their hardware - and glossy, shiny, beautiful and highly expensive hardware it is. Now, though, they run on the same basic processor as the beige boxes of their déclassé Windows comrades. Your Windows' box and your Apple box are, to most software, very similar. There has been much excitement among the hacker community that it might be possible to run Apple's shiny operating system on the more tawdry (and affordable) machines designed for Windows.

Apple has, until now, not been too bothered with putting copy-protection on its software. In the Apple world there is no complex registration, no bending over backwards to get extra licenses, no digging around for certificates that prove that you, the customer, are not a stinking pirate. This has served it well with consumers - part of the Apple reputation for ease of use, one might say.

Or more cynically, a calculation on Apple's part that if you're going to use a pirated version of its Mac OS X programme, you'll be using it on a piece of expensive Apple hardware. Apple will get its dollar either way.

But now, when techies are eager to run Mac OS X away from its home computers, will Apple protect its profits? And the most likely way for Apple to achieve a degree of exclusivity is to implement in their new machines a new hardware chipset called, rather euphemistically, "Trusted Computing".

Trusted, here, means trusted not by you, but by Apple, or third-party software vendors. Trusted Computing, in effect, hands over control over part of your computer to someone else, for their use, and for their remote administration. Once you have Trusted Computing running on your machine, there will be bits of it that you, and your software, won't have access to.

That's perfect for Apple - that part of your machine will be the part that checks to see if you're using a genuine Apple product. And if you're not, well, I'm afraid you can't run genuine Apple software.

Good for Apple. Less good when Apple comes to negotiate with the music labels the next time around. As I mentioned last week, such negotiations are fraught and frequent - and now Apple has something that the entertainment industry badly wants.

It's the dream of the music labels to have remote control over home users' computers. Indeed, when they first heard of Trusted Computing, they tried to pass a US law that would oblige all computers to carry it.

A machine that uses the Trusted Computing chip merely to protect Apple's software is too tempting a negotiating point for the music industry. They will, I am sure, want their own access to that inner sanctum of your home machine.

Several commentators, on first learning that Apple might be using Trusted Computing, hurried to reassure their fellow Mac fans that Apple would never use it for evil. But if Trusted Computing is in the Apple tree, temptation will quickly follow. Apple's entertainment industry colleagues will not stand for Jobs refusing access to it.

And once he's turned over access to Hollywood, everyone else will want to have exclusive control over chunks of your Mac. And, then, of course, Microsoft will be obliged to follow in its turn. The old slogan of Apple was: "the computer for the rest of us". It may well turn out that to protect its own profits, it'll be your computer they'll hand over to the rest of "them".