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Slimming The Curves (4/26/99)
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While the fun little activity of guessing about Apple's upcoming hardware is a fave party game in the domain of the Mac-specific rumors sites, it's relatively rare that you see the more generic news outlets joining in. When it happens, it generally either means that the rumor is very close to the truth-- close enough that it's so widely-reported that even, say, CNET picks up on it-- or waaaay off base. So when InfoWorld starts talking about the specs for Apple's soon-to-be-released "Lombard" PowerBook, it's worth sitting up and taking notice, because it's either going to include some "hard" news or some particularly entertaining misinformation.
According to the InfoWorld article, Apple was showing off a Lombard "behind closed doors" at the NAB conference last week. There's nothing too surprising there. But reportedly the Lombard they were showing is a super-thin laptop, "at least as thin as Sony's 0.9-inch Vaio portable," which we'd never heard to be part of the expected spec list. Furthermore, this Lombard will also feature a G4 starting at 400 MHz. Considering that Lombard is expected to be released pretty soon, we doubt that a G4 would really be the starting chip. And we also highly doubt that Lombard would be only "three-and-one-half-pounds." And don't even start with us about the "detachable LCD that can be replaced with goggles for so-called heads-up display." Cool, yes, but something that Apple will actually ship in the near future? Not a chance.
Our guess? The so-called "Lombard" described in the article was actually not a Lombard at all, but an Apple prototype for the "executive PowerBook" that Steve Jobs hinted about recently. Think about supermodels for a second; it's hard for a super-thin laptop to be super-curvy, and Lombard was code-named after San Francisco's Lombard Street, the curviest street in the world. O'Grady's PowerPage appears to agree with our assessment, but Mac OS Rumors claims that, yes, Apple is indeed planning to release Lombard as a super-thin unit. Mysterious indeed. Could a last-minute decision to stick Lombard into a super-thin enclosure be why it still hasn't been released? (Even crash diets take time.) Seems like we've been waiting for this thing forever...
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SceneLink (1485)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 4/26/99 episode: April 26, 1999: Apple's upcoming Lombard PowerBook seems to be undergoing some serious last-minute plastic surgery. Meanwhile, Quake 3: Arena's first test release originally surfaces as a Mac-only download, and Apple's dispute over the appleimac.com domain name is resolved peacefully with the Canadian teen who was squatting on it...
Other scenes from that episode: 1486: 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.)... 1487: 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...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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