Every month, My Mac presents the best from As the Apple Turns, one of the very best Mac web sites on the Internet today. Culling the best is no easy task, as Jack Miller writes such fantastic stuff. We want to reprint it all! But, alas, we choose a small sampling of his work and present it here as it originally appeared on the AtAT web site. Enjoy, and when your done, be sure to check out his web site for the up-to-the-minute latest and greatest! <http://www.infoxczar.com/atat>
Get Ready To Splurge (4/28/99)
Are you one of those people who's just never satisfied? You know what we mean; like, you know you should be happy with that tricked-out icebox G3/400 with a full gigabyte of RAM, three 36 GB Ultra2 SCSI hard drives in a RAID array, DVD-RAM, and gigabit Ethernet (only $17,817 at the Apple Store with an Apple Studio Display 20" monitor! Isn't it fun maxing out all the options?), but somehow you still find yourself pining for the Next Big Thing‚Ñ¢. Congratulations-- you're what keeps the tech world moving forward. If it weren't for people like you, we'd probably all still be using Mac II's, or even (shudder) DOS. So give yourself a big pat on the back as your reach for that overstressed credit card to make your next purchase.
As for what that next purchase is likely to be, well, the Next Big Thing‚Ñ¢ in Macintosh computing promises to be the Power Mac G4. Yes, the G3 will get a speed bump, probably within the next few weeks, but besides faster processor speeds there won't be any real differences from the very first icebox G3's that shipped back in January. (Can you believe it's really been almost four months?) The G4, on the other hand, will be a whole new cup of noodles, according to Apple Insider. If you'd like to drool over the rumored specifics of the new machine due this fall; reportedly the new Sawtooth motherboard will finally gain a 4x AGP graphics slot, a 100-133 MHz system bus, and will debut pushing Altivec-enhanced G4 processors running at 450, 500, and 550 MHz Beyond that, it's far too early to tell whether Apple will change the plastics of the current El Capitan case when the G4 ships, but personally we don't expect much of a change beyond a big "G4" on the side and maybe a new color.
But wait! There's more. For those among you who aren't all that interested in speculation about a computer that won't see the light of day for at least another five months, Apple Insider includes some background on the project that should also appeal to drama fans who remember Apple's ill-fated Power Express project. Power Express, you may recall, was going to be the "pro" G3 Mac; the beige G3 we got back in November of 1997 was originally supposed to be a mid-range motherboard, but Apple was forced to re-cast it as a pro system when Power Express (a six-slot system, incidentally) went kaput after two years of work. Think of it as the Copland of Mac hardware-- except that Power Express was apparently pretty good and actually got Steved, prompting several of the engineers who had been working on the project to leave Apple and find work elsewhere. The Power Mac G4 is the project that fills Power Express' vacant shoes-- but that still doesn't mean it's going to have more than three slots.
"Beauty" That's Skin-Deep (4/27/99)
You knew it was only a matter of time before the iMac knock-offs started appearing, right? After all, given that the iMac is one of the most successful computers of all time (yes, we're just making assumptions, so don't ask for proof), it was obvious from the beginning that some companies would try to figure out just what made the iMac so darn popular and then incorporate that "iMacness" into their own products. For a particularly blatant example, NoBeige pointed us towards A-Top Technology, whose new PC cases could not be a more obvious ripoff of the iMac color scheme. After all, there's no denying that the iMac's distinctive translucent coloring is at least partially responsible for its runaway popularity...
...But A-Top's "Color Series Translucent Plastic Cases" aren't just colored and translucent-- the clearly went beyond just borrowing a page from Apple's book and instead pretty much photocopied the whole chapter on "Color," crossed out Apple's name, and scrawled theirs in instead. One glance at the A-Top cases and you notice that they use a solid translucent color highlighted with a translucent white-- "Ice," anyone? More to the point, three of the available colors are named exactly like Apple's: Lime, Strawberry, and Grape. Then there's Orange-- how sneaky of them to rename Tangerine. A note states that Blueberry is "coming soon." And the final color available now is called "Blackish Green," which is basically a muddier Bondi Blue with a name that, instead of evoking the deep blue-green waters of Bondi Beach in Australia, evokes the mental image of a brackish swamp. (Elsewhere on the page, the color is referred to as "Dark Teal," which is a step in the right direction.) Not that A-Top doesn't have some innovation coming soon-- apparently black and white enclosures are on their way.
Sure, it's kind of goofy to see a company hawking iMac-themed PC cases that lack the overall curved and integrated simplicity of the iMac itself, but if you've got to use a PC, we suppose they beat having a beige box. Plus, A-Top claims that owning one of these cases "drastically increases the overall quality & value of the entire system," so how can you go wrong? You even get something that you won't find in an iMac or a blue-and-white G3-- a slot for a floppy drive. Where do we sign up?
iLove Your Style (4/22/99)
So we've got a couple of national retailers selling iMacs, now; there's CompUSA, still going great guns, and there's Best Buy, who apparently exists primarily to lend a sense of comic relief. In addition, rumors have been floating around that Sears will climb back on the Apple wagon to sell iMacs and iBooks this summer. All told, that's still not a very pervasive national presence, even once you lump in all the local and regional resellers. The iMac is meant to be less a computer and more a computing appliance, so the ideal case would have iMacs as visible as possible to regular everyday consumers in all kinds of department stores, not just in computer-specific outlets. The "Look, honey! It's one of those iMac things!" factor should be a major selling force, especially given how irresistible the fruit-flavored lumps are in person.
So Apple Insider's rumors that JCPenney is planning to start selling iMacs could be a really good thing. Even though the current rumor has JCPenney only selling iMacs via their holiday catalog this fall, if that all goes well, it's not unimaginable that in-store sales displays might be in the cards shortly thereafter. If iMacs eventually make it into both Sears and JCPenney stores, consumers will be able to buy iMacs at a high percentage of malls in this country. And that's the kind of saturation we'd like to see.
On a similar note, lots of viewers have written in to voice their opinion that Apple should be courting Kmart as an iMac reseller. While we agree that the widespread exposure such a deal could create would be a great thing, there's such a tricky balancing act to contend with-- saturation vs. service. After all, if Best Buy was such a bust at moving iMacs, who's to say Kmart wouldn't fare much, much worse? Or Sears, for that matter? We really wish the economies of scale would allow Apple to open its own retail outlets all over the world so that service and display issues could be kept under control, but until that magical day arrives, it's going to be an uphill battle fighting against the Best Buy syndrome.
Just Quaking Around (4/26/99)
The Mac games world drifts ever deeper into the Twilight Zone. It used to be that one of the universal constants was the unflagging Mac hatred of id software's head honcho John Carmack. (Carmack, for those of you who don't follow such things, is the closest thing there is to a celebrity in the games development milieu; he's the one who brought the world Doom and Quake.) Just as light happily never exceeds the speed of 186,282 miles per second, Carmack swore blindly that Quake 3: Arena (the next iteration in the popular kill-your-friends series, which, this time, is multi-player only) would never be ported to the Mac OS, whose admittedly sketchy memory management scheme he considered beneath contempt. In the past several months, however, Strange Things‚Ñ¢ have been happening; the iMac revitalized the Macintosh as a viable consumer platform, Apple made games development a big priority, and the weirdness culminated at Macworld Expo in San Francisco last January when Apple announced that it had licensed the popular OpenGL set of 3D APIs from Silicon Graphics-- and trotted out OpenGL poster boy John Carmack to announce the planned simultaneous release of Quake 3: Arena for Windows and Macintosh. (Carmack has stated that he likes OpenGL more than he dislikes the Mac OS.) And then the bottom dropped out of the universe as Carmack gave the world the first public glimpse of Q3A gameplay-- and it was running on a Mac.
As if that weren't bizarre enough, so far it seems that the promise of a Q3A simultaneous release is holding true. Q3Test, the first public release of the game's infrastructure meant to test the multiplayer network code under actual "battle" conditions, has been anxiously awaited for the last few months, and for a while the complete and utter lack of the mention of a Mac version had some people worried. Not long ago, though, id confirmed that there would be a Mac version of Q3Test released, and the world rejoiced. What we didn't expect was to see Mac Q3Test released before the Windows version. It's true; the Mac version surfaced on Sunday, while the Windows version is still nowhere to be seen. There's a test of the server for Win32, but no client. Spooky enough for you?
We don't know what kind of alien mind-controlling parasite Steve Jobs managed to implant at the base of Carmack's skull, but we're happy as clams that the little bugger is doing its job so darn well. Q3Test is here, it's real, and it's sitting on our hard drive unplayed.
Frankly, the unprecedented time-sucking factor of Q3Test is already legendary, and we already need a 36-hour day just to get all the "productive" stuff done, so we're more than a little wary of getting hooked on a new obsession right now. But maybe we'll just fire it up for a quick little peek tonight. Uh huh. At which point we strongly suspect that Carmack's own species of mind-controlling alien will probably be taking over our lives.
Master Of His Domain (4/26/99)
Remember all that hoo-ha a couple of months ago about Apple trying to put the hurt on a seventeen-year-old Canadian kid over the registration of the appleimac.com domain name? Well, it's finally been resolved; Abdul Traya, who had been holding out for a donation of thirty iMacs to his school in exchange for turning the domain name over to Apple, has folded his hand and agreed to let Apple have what they want. His payment? A "pocketful of legal fees and a token payment," according to a Reuters article.
All in all, we think this Traya kid came out of the whole thing just dandy. After all, the publicity that the dispute kicked up gave him some half-million web visits just in the first week following the story's break. His home web-hosting business got a ton of attention. All in all, the press probably would never have even picked up on the story in the first place if he hadn't have been a teenager; a thirty-six-year-old doing the same thing would have been dismissed as a cybersquatter infringing blatantly on Apple's trademarks. Instead Traya gets his legal fees paid for and some cash to blow on penny whistles and moon pies. So we're happy that everyone else is happy.
 
The last time we checked, www.appleimac.com still pointed
to a particularly surrealistic page titled "Welcome to my page
about my dog!!" which includes a photo of an adorably
confused-looking pup named "Goody" taken in 1996. Any day
now we expect that it'll start pointing to Apple's main page, which we consider just, if not just slightly a shame. Sure, we think Apple had every right to go after the domain name in the interests of protecting its trademarks, but somehow we doubt they're going to do anything with it as truly bizarre as point it at a snapshot of a confused dog. Of course, if they do, then they're even cooler than we thought...
The i Side of Sears (4/15/99)
Every once in a while it's probably a good idea to take a step back and see how Apple's doing on the national retail outlet front. After Apple cleaned the slate a couple of years back, the sole remaining national retailer still allowed to sell Apple products was CompUSA. After a rocky start, most of CompUSA's bigger store-within-a-store problems seem to have settled down; sure, there are apparently still stores with no Apple-savvy personnel available (a blatant contract violation, we're told), and the continued omission of Macs and Mac-related software and accessories from the CompUSA Sunday circulars continues to rankle us like steel wool underwear, but for the most part things have improved. A lot of it comes down to who's running the Mac end of things at each particular store; there are some insanely great CompUSAs out there from a Mac perspective.
Then there's Best Buy. Wow, where to start... Put simply, the average iMac buying experience at Best Buy is akin to trying to wrestle a hunk of meat from a hungry tiger on speed-- you stand a slim chance of getting what you want, but the medical bills make it a hollow victory. Prospective iMac buyers were steered towards Wintels by untrained staff who openly bad-mouthed Apple on the store floor, prompting management to panic when they saw that, for some strange reason, they weren't selling as many iMacs as they'd hoped. Remember that panicked unloading of iMacs at $999 last year? And now there are still no fruit-flavored iMacs in Best Buy because they were squeamish about stocking five colors, and no one knows when they'll come back on board.
Let's hope Apple fares better with Sears, who, according to Apple Insider, is expected to sign back on with Apple to sell iMacs and the future consumer portable (now apparently officially dubbed the "iBook"). The rumors lack shape so far, but if Sears is really going to start selling Apple's consumer line sometime this summer, we'd have to say that MacWorld Expo seems like a natural time to announce the new alliance. That way, Sears could start selling iMacs immediately after the announcement-- and since the iBook will probably be released at the Expo as well, the timing's perfect. Can Apple avoid "Best Buy II"? We're keeping our fingers crossed...
And Your Bird Can Sing (4/19/99)
You can't win 'em all, and neither can Apple. A California state appeals court ruled last week that in the astoundingly long dispute between Apple Computer and Apple Corps (the company founded by the Beatles to distribute their music-- does anyone else remember the halved green apples on the labels of many of John Lennon's records? Uh, does anyone else remember records?), not only is Apple liable to pony up $35 million for using the Apple name, but they also can't just stick their insurance companies with the bill. A San Jose Mercury News article has the grisly details.
See, it was almost ten years ago that Apple (our Apple) finally agreed to pay the other Apple thirty-five million dollars for the right to use the Apple trademark. Originally, Apple Corps was cool with Apple Computer sharing the trademark, provided that Apple (again, our Apple-- this is harder than it looks) stayed in the computer business and kept away from the music and recording industries. Unfortunately, eventually Mac turned into some great little musicmakers, and Apple Corps took that to be a breach of contract. But when the 1990 agreement was hammered out, it looked like Apple could just tell its insurance companies to foot the bill; last Friday's ruling changes that, and it looks like there might be a $35 million one-time charge in Apple's quarterly results sometime in the future. Apple plans to appeal the ruling, taking the case to the California Supreme Court, so the twenty-year battle continues; it ain't over until the Japanese conceptual artist, er, sings.
Personally, we're just fine with Apple losing a $35 million court case-- we're hoping the Trial Gods are taking note, so that they'll be more inclined to smile upon our poor court-bound heroes when the real money's on the line. Specifically, we're talking about that billion-dollar-lawsuit hanging over Apple's collective head like the Sword of Damocles. Or like a big stone bowling ball about to konk Fred Flintstone on the head so hard Barney won't be able to revive him in time to win the lodge tournament. (Take your pick of similes, we're flexible.) When this whole Imatec/ColorSync thing goes to court, we're hoping that Apple's trial karma weighs heavily in their favor, because nothing would put a damper on the comeback festivities like having to cut a check with eleven zeroes to some guy angling for a handout.
•Jack Miller• <jackm@infoXczar.com>
Websites mentioned:
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