It was a valuable object lesson to attend Macworld this month. Apple Computer is back, and the excitement among developers and devotees was palpable in the charged atmosphere of Steve Jobs' keynote. In the afterglow, Apple's experience reveals some home truths about the state of competition in desktop computing.

First, the PC market is not nearly as competitive as some would like us to think. I was at the Jobs keynote in August '97 when he announced-to catcalls from the Mac faithful-that Microsoft would make a $500 million investment in Apple and that Apple, in turn, would use Microsoft's browser on the Mac. This month, Microsoft went out of its way to show new, Mac-only features for its latest browser and a Web site dedicated to Apple fans.

Bill Gates knows such investments stand to earn Microsoft market-share points as well as antitrust leverage. Similarly, Intel Corp., now that its Federal Trade Commission hearing is about to start, has opened the door a crack in licensing its Pentium II processor-bus technology. These moves are largely sops to the regulatory powers that be.

Nonetheless, Apple has shown how, with a little focus and risk-taking, a systems company can still provide some differentiation in a seemingly commodity market. That Apple can lay claim to the world's fastest personal computers, by any of the usual, questionable benchmarks, is a testament to the designers behind its new G3 system and the PowerPC that drives it.

The copper interconnects that IBM and Motorola pioneered have helped push past Intel's mega-fabbed might. If Apple, IBM and Motorola are really as united and focused here as they claim (and I suspect the other shoe has yet to drop on the matter of the PowerPC's AltiVec extensions), they could continue to give users a real choice in powerful platforms.

The mass media have seized on Apple's industrial design-the iMac's rainbow of colors and the user-friendly door to the G3. More important, though, Apple's willingness to drive such standards as Firewire shows that it's still possible to add value in electronics design, even in the margin-battered PC world. That's a threshold every engineer ought to cross.