Apple Archive

"Apple's future doesn't ride on the speed of its Macs. In fact, Apple's future doesn't ride with Macs at all anymore. No, I haven't been off in the desert downing peyote. What I saw from my sideline perch is that the Mac's day has come and gone." Read the interesting editorial at BusinessWeek. Elsewhere, Maccentral has a round-up article: "Developers, Analysts weigh in on the G5, Panther".

I have to friendly argue about the OSNews article about Apple: "Could an eMac Strategy Bring More Market Share to Apple?" That article is written from the Computer enthusiast point of view rather from the business man point of view, which usually diverges from the hobbyist, because it considers things that nobody that is not in the Marketing business is aware of. I understand Marketing as defined by Kotler: the right mix of Price, Product, Place and Promotion.

Many would argue that market share is not the same as user base. But it doesn't ultimately matter. What really matters is to have as many users as possible, so it will attract more developers and create an actual "market" around the platform. Less users, less money flowing, less third party development, which ultimately leads to the death of a platform. I was reading today this and this editorials, even journalists now buy the "cheap PCs with Linux" deal. Apple has to wake up before is too late and should offer a cheap solution. Apple should learn from NeXT's mistakes, not duplicate them. Update: Look inside for one more idea by some of our readers.

Regarding the latest on Apple's side: The Guardian has an article, "a look inside Apple's new push for speed" Sanluisobispo says, "G5 breaks Apple's speed limit" Sunspot says. Elsewhere, Apple has quietly posted the winners of the Eighth Annual Apple Design Awards, which "honored developers for the creation of outstanding Macintosh-compatible software products." Also, this document is a high-level summary of the salient features to keep in mind while (re)targetting your programs to run on the G5.

I was present at Apple's WWDC yesterday and witnessed one of the historical moments in Apple's history, the introduction of their 64-bit platform. Am I impressed? The answer is complicated. I was happy to see Apple moving on and deliver. But I would have expected nothing less from a 4 billion tech company who had the need to catch up with the "other" platform, the 32-bit PC. You all heard by now what's new in yesterday's press releases and news coverings. But here is a wrap up of the first day of the conference and a commentary on what Apple really announced yesterday, underneath its surrounding distortion field.

The specs for the G5 machines that were accidentally posted at the Apple store a few days ago were correct. Steve Jobs just announced G5 Powermacs at the WWDC conference. He's calling it the "world's fastest personal computer." They just finished doing a demo in which a Dual 2 GHz G5 vastly outperforms a High-end Dual Xeon. Read more for preliminary specs. Prices will be $2000-3000. Oh, and the Panther OSX update was announced, but we already knew about that.

A number of web sites reported that the database that holds the Apple Store data has been accidentally updated (and later its webmaster took down the whole Store website). While the headline in the final rendered web page is still calling it a "G4", the specs are mentioning the following:

"Who needs Internet Explorer, now that Jobs & Co. has its own browser? The much bigger threat is the growing chance that Microsoft will abandon Office for the Mac." Read the article at BusinessWeek.

Bangkokpost says that the dev tools on Macs are not so great. And there is already a rebuttal article on the subject. Elsewhere, Roz Ho, the general manager of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, has confirmed that no future versions of Internet Explorer will be released for the Mac. In the meantime, Apple Security Update 2003-06-12 for OS X Server 10.2.6 only is out and available for download.

Apple Computer plans to discuss how it will incorporate HyperTransport, a rapid chip-to-chip communications technology, into future computers later this month at its developer conference.

eWEEK is reporting that Apple is nearing the release of a new Power Mac known internally as Q37, which will include the new chip. However, Q37 will ship before Apple rolls out a 64-bit version of Panther in September. Instead, the new Power Macs will ship with a special Jaguar build train code-named Smeagol. Smeagol will run on the new chip but won't take advantage of many of its key features, limiting initial performance gains.

This story has been removed at request of Apple Computer, Inc. We respect Apple's wishes to this sensitive matter.

TheRegister reports that Motorola boosting its PPC processors by 20 percent. According to the article, "With Apple expected to announce a shift to IBM's 64-bit PowerPC 970 processor in just a few weeks' time, the timing of Motorola's announcement takes on a new relevance." Additionally, iSync 1.1 adds broader phone support, Safari bookmarks while QuickTime 6.3 adds 3GPP, improves iApp support.

Good news for Mac OS X users or users-to-be today. Apple dropped the price of the 15" Powerbooks $300 and the price of the 12" Powerbook $200. Additionally, Silk 2.0 enables the Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.1.5 in all Carbon applications. This means antialiased text in Internet Explorer, Eudora, and many others.