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.

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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.

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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.

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My work experience includes the broadcast, print and online mediums, so I can’t say that any of this applies to me, but with the growth of so-called blogging, the issue is becoming more and more important. Apple’s lawsuit against the popular Mac-rumor site, Think Secret, simply means that this is an issue that cries for a solution, even if it has to come from the courts.

In preparing material for the next episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, I talked about the matter with two of our guests. One important point came up, and that is that if a story delivering secret information about the Mac mini and iPod Shuffle appeared in The Wall Street Journal or a similar mainstream publication, Apple wouldn’t dare file a complaint. The same can be said for CNET, although most of its content appears online. A journalist’s privilege, the refusal to disclose sources for a story, wouldn’t be an issue, and besides those places have a team of lawyers on hand or on call to deal with such matters.

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