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The Clock Is Ticking (5/12/99)
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So as a Mac owner, have you gotten smug about the Y2K problem yet? Oh, don't worry-- a certain smugness is probably justified; after all, the Mac itself has been just fine with the concept of a year greater than 1999 ever since it first rolled off the lines fifteen years ago. Just don't get too smug, because just because your computer itself is compliant, that doesn't guarantee that all your applications are. And by the same token, just because your Mac is Y2K-ready, that doesn't mean that the company that made it is, too.
That's right-- according to a Reuters article, Apple's had to increase its estimate of its "total external spending associated with Year 2000 issues" because costs have gone up. Whereas previously they expected to spend a total of about $9 million to fix up Y2K-clueless systems, they now figure the grand total is more likely to be about $13.2 million-- and it could well be higher. And while we initially assumed that they were talking about internal PC-based systems used for manufacturing, finance, and all that other fun ERP stuff, the article states that Apple expects to spend "$6.8 million to address Y2K compliance of certain Apple branded products." Given that Macs are pretty much ready to go (or so we've all been told, by no less an authority than HAL 9000-- he wouldn't lie, would he?), we find ourselves wondering just which Apple-branded products those might be. Old IIGS systems, or what?
Anyway, presumably Apple's taking care of whatever the problems are, so we imagine we don't have a whole lot to worry about from an end-user standpoint. Right now our biggest Y2K concern involves whether our cable service will be interrupted; we can't live for long without the Cartoon Network. While others are stocking up on canned goods and bottled water, we're frantically taping hour after hour of Space Ghost. After all, you've gotta have your priorities straight...
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SceneLink (1528)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/12/99 episode: May 12, 1999: The mysterious Mac OS 8.6 phone number kicks up a king-sized ruckus. Meanwhile, IBM leaps into the game console fray and agrees to make PowerPC chips for Nintendo's next game system, and Apple's costs in dealing with the year 2000 just went up...
Other scenes from that episode: 1526: Flooding Our Lines (5/12/99) Okay, it's like this: we don't actually keep formal tabs on such statistics, but we're quite sure that yesterday's speculation about the mysterious "phone number" in Mac OS 8.6's disk image Get Info comments box generated more feedback than any other single item in AtAT's nineteen months on the air... 1527: Console Consolation (5/12/99) Poor PowerPC-- it's such a lovely chip architecture, and yet the processor itself is horribly underutilized in high-profile computing products. Sure, they're beating at the heart of every Mac sold in the past several years, but let's face it; there are a lot more Pentiums out there slogging through day-to-day computing tasks...
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