Been saving your nickels and dimes for a blazingly-fast PowerMac 9600/350? The dream was not to be, friend... MacInsider has the exclusive-- the speedy Mach 5 model is due to be discontinued on October 10th. The rationale? Not enough chips to go around to fill demand. What's more, it appears that Apple knew that this would happen all along, and only announced the product to compete with Power Computing for bragging rights to "the fastest desktop computer in the world."

You may have noticed that Apple Marketing equates "fastest" with "highest clock speed," whether or not the chip is actually measurably faster. Remember the 6500/300 ads that claimed that machine was the fastest? Yes, there was a little asterisked disclaimer stating that the comparison was based solely on clock speed and that "real-world performance may vary." But there were several >200MHz 604e machines shipping at the time that would have stomped the 6500's curvy butt into the concrete. This bizarre criterion may explain Apple's decision to use 350 MHz Mach 5 604e's in its top-of-the-line system, rather than the slower clock-speed (yet much faster overall) 750 chips. Of course, since the Mac press isn't a pack of total imbeciles, they found that the 9600/350 was trounced soundly by pre-production 750 clones in the works by Power Computing and Motorola, and reported as much.

So, what to do? Refuse to certify the 750 clones. You know what happened next. And now, with the threat of competition gone, Apple is free to discontinue the model they only created to compete with the cloners.

Bottom line, it looks like the 9600/350 is harder to obtain than Janeane Garafalo's home phone number. (Email us if you have a lead on either commodity.)

Be, the up-and-coming contender in the desktop OS match, has been wooing developers with sweet words for a while now-- and backing up those words with action. AtAT staff attended the last Be Developers' Conference, and we can tell you that droves of soon-to-be-ex-Mac developers were swooning before the promise of a totally modern, fully multithreaded OS that runs on PPC and Intel-- one that is written by dedicated, focused programmers that listen to developer feedback and respond quickly to suggestions and bug reports. And one that is being given away by its creators (at least initially) to increase market share.

Ask any Macintosh programmer how they feel about Apple's developer relations, and they'll probably laugh in your face. The boys in Cupertino are not well-known for keeping their developers happy. In fact, Apple seems to lack everything that developers like about Be.

Be, on the other hand, seems to be doing everything right. And the latest right move is the addition of ex-Apple VP of Developer Relations Heidi Roizen. Many Mac developers think that Heidi was the one bright spot in Apple's developer relations in recent years. One more reason to look at Be?

Wow, do I even need to say it? Larry Ellison, the NC Poster Boy, had what might have been the worst day of his professional career on Tuesday. Techweb has the story. In a nutshell, pretend you're about to give a huge demo of how cool network computers are. What's the last thing you want to happen? How about, oh, say, the network going down?

That's right-- Larry gave a demo, all right. He demonstrated to thousands of people the achilles heel of a Network Computer: No Network, No Computer. And while the idea of lots of cheap, fast NC's for the office might sound like a good idea to some people, Larry's demo might make them think again.

In the meantime, Apple's still chugging away on its own education-targeted NC, to be unveiled in January. In that environment, it could work; Yours Truly used NC's exclusively for four years in school, with nary a hitch-- sit down at any terminal on campus, log in, and Bam! There's all my stuff, exactly how I left it. But while the 266 Mhz 750 box for $800 sounds great, when it comes to the possibility of widespread adoption, let me leave you with a couple of quotes from the net:

"You can have my hard drive when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers."

"Do you want an NC? Do you know anyone who does?"