Apple Archive

"Put all these threads together, and it appears that Apple is shifting strategy towards becoming a software company--admittedly, a software company that depends upon its own hardware. In the future, I expect to see more software from Apple, and for more of it to be sold as an upgrade to what users already own, or delivered as a paid service of some sort." Editorial and MacWorld roundup at ZDNews.

The Idea Basket holds an interesting interview with Stuart Cheshire, Apple Computer employee and also Chairman of the IETF ZeroConf, regarding Rendezvous and more.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs touts new features for OS X, unveils new lower-cost iPods--including one for Windows, and a 17-inch flat panel iMac. Read more in a ZDNet News Focus. Our Take: So, no G4 speed bumps? And no word for the G5s, still? BTW, that new Sherlock 3 looks like a Watson replica.

"Apple Computer plans to serve up a new iMac model with a larger flat-panel display during next week's Macworld Expo trade show, according to sources. The upgrade to a 17-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) comes as sales have all but stalled on existing 15-inch flat-panel iMacs." Read the report at ZDNews.

Apple (silently again) purchased the third video-related company in less than two months. This time, is Prismo Graphics and it comes after the purchase of Nothing Real and Silicon Grail. Our Take: Now that SGI is no longer as "big" as it used to be regarding video software, and no important or many commercial packages have been ported to Linux, MacOSX has a real chance to further strengthen in this niche market about professional video editing. Only problem to solve will be Windows and the faster/cheaper Xeon/P4 PCs. With Steve Jobs being also an exec at Pixar, it should be obvious where he tries to head Apple and why Quartz Extreme is being developed for.

The Danish Technical University (DTU) has developed Scandinavia's largest dedicated Mac cluster, consisting of 32 dedicated Power Mac G4 Dual 800 MHz workstations which is equal to 200 Gigaflop or 6 million instructions per second.

Apple Computer has kept itself busy of late creating new recipes for marketing and sales. The company recently cooked up a public preview of QuickTime 6. To get a taste of Apple's future, CNET News.com sits down with Steve Jobs and bites into the issues. The interview is about the MPEG-4 issues, the iMac, while you will also find an article about eMac, now being sold to everyone, and not just to educational institutes and students.

"Microsoft plans to release on Monday the first significant update to the Mac OS X version of Office and will also introduce a version of its instant messaging program designed for the latest Mac operating system." Read the report at ZDNews. On other Mac news, both DigiTimes and TheRegister are reporting that new iMacs, with larger LCD monitors will debut on the 3rd quarter this year.

"Recent word from sources close to Motorola confirm that a significant speed bump will be timed for MacWorld Expo in July, raising current bus speeds, and seeing new 7470-based G4s raise frequencies to as high as 1.5Ghz. What of the G5? That's still on course for volume production early next year, in the form of what's codenamed the 7500. Public Motorola roadmaps describe this as a processor that conforms to the e500 Book E G5 spec, and it's been rated stable at 2.4GHz internally at Motorola. But to get a handle on this it's worth paying attention to the internals, as this indicates an important rethink in the Megahertz wars." Read the report at TheRegister.

The release of Apple's latest hardware offerings this month has caused quite a stir among Apple loyalists. This is only Apple's second foray into creating a truly dedicated server machine, the first of which being the "Network Server 500/700", which Apple sold in 1995 running AIX. The question on everyone's mind now is going to be what this means for Apple's prospects as a server platform. Certainly everyone agrees that the new machine looks nice, but how will it on the duties it will be required to perform. Furthermore, what kind of price/performance ratio is Apple offering when compared to the current group of servers.

The first big news today from the WWDC 2002 is that Apple now officially stops the MacOS 9 development and goes full speed with OSX. Steve Jobs calls the next step "X only. It's time to drop OS 9," he said. "We can do things in X that we just can't do in 9... a hundred percent of what we're doing is X only." He cited Microsoft as an example of companies that are going X only. Apple expects to see 5 million MacOSX users by the end of the year. "These are the guys buying the application software," he said. "MacOS 9 isn't dead for our customers, but it is for you . Today we say goodbye to MacOS 9 for all future development," said Jobs. Stay tuned for more news from WWDC. Update: "Quartz Extreme" will probably force most of the Mac users to upgrade. Read on. Update 2: Read on.

In this first part of a two-part series, Simson Garfinkel and Michael Mahoney explain why Cocoa and Mac OS X aren't nearly as revolutionary as they are evolutionary -- and still in the process of refinement. The story begins with Apple's genesis in the 1970s and takes you through key events up through 1993, when NeXTSTEP began to flounder. In Part Two (Friday, May 10), Simson and Michael pick up the story with the Star Trek project and bring you to the current iteration of Mac OS X. Update: Apple has released a "Kernel Programming" online book, which has a wide and diverse audience like the set of potential system software developers for MacOSX, including the following sorts of developers: device-driver writers, network-extension writers, file-system writers, developers of software that modifies file system data on-the-fly, system programmers familiar with BSD, Linux, and similar OSes, developers who want to learn about kernel programming.

OSNews reader Henrik "rain" Petersson writes: "In a drafty shed in rural northern California is perhaps the rarest Macintosh ever made: an electronically shielded Mac used by a spy or military agency. The machine appears to be unique, and is so secret, no one knows anything about it." Part I and Part II of the article at Wired.

"They're here, they're slow, get used to it. At least for now. One of Apple's top goals for its new flat-panel iMacs is to get home consumers to switch from Windows PCs. But some who rushed to order the attractive new computer sight unseen say they have been disappointed: For Web browsing -- still the biggest time use of home computers after e-mail -- the new iMacs are notably slower than a PC. Yep, even an older, cheaper one." Get the story at Wired. Some G4 benchmarks against the PCs and commentary can be found here.