Sound and Fury (1/22/99)
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Speaking of arbitrary and unfair discrimination against Macs, how many of you have been considering getting a super-fast ADSL Internet connection from Bell Atlantic? ADSL, or Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line, can yield download speeds orders of magnitude higher than you can get with a standard 56 kbps modem. It can be kind of expensive, but for people who need a lot of bandwidth in areas where cable modems are not available, it can be a great alternative-- at least, unless the ADSL provider in your area happens to be Bell Atlantic, and you happen to have a Macintosh. Bell Atlantic supports Pentium systems and iMacs-- but only iMacs. Even if you've got a brand new blue and white Power Mac G3, Bell Atlantic will refuse to hook you up because it's neither a Pentium nor an iMac. Strange but true.

For more on this bizarre policy, we urge you to read through Steve Godun's saga of bureaucratic horror. Steve attempted to get Bell Atlantic to sell him ADSL service for his PowerTower Pro, which, as we know from personal experience, has the only real ADSL requirement-- an Ethernet port-- built right in. Steve was given an incredible runaround that we would previously have assumed could spring forth only from the mind of Franz Kafka, and was consistently denied service due to "policy." When he investigated the reasons behind the anti-Mac policy, he dug up several; unfortunately, all of them are false. Many Macs don't have the processing power or memory necessary to support ADSL? ADSL interfaces to a network device-- it's completely unrelated to any processor or memory in that device. You can't get the Ethernet address from a Mac? Apparently they just haven't tried. Eventually tech support admitted that they couldn't see any technical reason why non-iMac Macs weren't supported, but that didn't change the policy one bit. Steve is still trying to get a hold of somebody who instituted this policy to find out what's up.

What we find particularly bizarre about the whole thing is that Bell Atlantic is throwing away free money by not taking on Mac subscribers. They're already supporting iMacs, so their support costs wouldn't increase, so what's the problem? Accepting iMacs while rejecting other Ethernet-enabled Macs is, as Steve himself puts it, "rather like saying a certain highway is available only for a Ford Escort, and since you have a Ford Explorer your vehicle won't work on that road." We wish Steve the best of luck in getting to the bottom of this whole mess.

 
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The above scene was taken from the 1/22/99 episode:

January 22, 1999: Mac users concerned about losing their rebellious image can relax, if the latest PC World top ten picks are any indication. Meanwhile, Bell Atlantic's ignorance is showing, and Intel's plan to tag computers in the wild has many privacy-concerned citizens up in arms...

Other scenes from that episode:

  • 1286: Get Your Motor Running (1/22/99)   If all of those studies are to be believed, there are plenty of benefits to being a Mac user instead a PC user: increased productivity, quicker return on investment, higher sense of satisfaction, all that stuff...

  • 1288: Big Brother Inside (1/22/99)   Just when you thought there couldn't possibly be any more reasons to use a Mac, Intel goes and throws another one on the pile. Perhaps you've heard about the Pentium III? It's yet another instance of Intel's brilliant engineers managing to strap more rocket engines onto a roller skate; the fundamental technology at the heart of the Pentium line goes all the way back to the '70's, and it's a real testament to Intel that they've managed to squeeze six gallons of juice out of a single orange...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...

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