New & Noteworthy: Schiller defends Jaguar Pricing; Jobs

embarrassed; AOL goes steady with iChat

Schiller defends Jaguar, .mac pricing In an interview with BusinessWeek Online, Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller defends the pricing of both Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and .mac. "We came out with OS X 10.0 in May, 2001, at $129. That's our usual price for paid upgrades. Last fall, we came out with 10.1 Normally, we would decide to charge $129, but because we wanted to help the adoption of OS X, we made it free to our customers. Now, with 10.2, it's $129 again, same as it always has been," says Schiller. More.

Jobs embarrassed by scandals Apple iCEO Steve Jobs is “for the first time embarrassed to call (himself) a businessman," in the wake of the accounting scandals surfaced from Enron and Worldcom, according to a Macworld UK report. While Apple's stock fell about 15 percent after its quarterly earnings report, the company's shares regained some ground (along with the rest of the market) yesterday. More.

AOL goes steady with iChat America Online is scaling back efforts to make its popular instant messaging system work with rivals, saying the task has proven too difficult and expensive. One of the few exceptions to AOL's new rule is Apple's iChat client, which will incorporate full support for the AIM standard. The service currently has an estimated 150 million subscribers. More.