For few days now, MacOS Rumors has been speculating on some kind of collaboration between Apple and Lucent Technologies, those guys who split off of Bell Labs, who have those stark white TV commercials with words being typed during the voiceover. Apparently their suspicions were heightened by the new Lucent commercial, which includes a Macintosh startup chime as the screen changes from an old monochrome green DOS-like screen to a more Mac-like deal. The commercial was just a coincidence, it turns out (the ad's creator used a Mac), but Rumors continues to report on a possible Apple/Lucent project.

What kind of project? Wireless networking. Lucent has long been a pioneer in that area; they worked on the Manta and Grouper products from Digital Ocean last year. Now Rumors is saying that future Macs may be networkable out of the box by simply putting two system nearby each other. No more wires! Keen, huh? Except that given the cost of the existing wireless add-ons, we'd expect that such a feature would pump up the price of a computer by at least $400, probably more. And throughput isn't the greatest-- while Ethernet is 10Mbps, the Manta II maxes out at only 2Mbps. So this way-cool feature almost certainly wouldn't surface in Apple's NC's, for example, since they rely on network speed to be useful. But the technology will only get faster and cheaper, so someday it may be feasible as an out-of-the-box solution. And there's no telling what top-secret stuff Lucent's still got hidden behind closed doors...

ThessaSOURCE has just posted a really nice analysis of the possibilities of an Apple-Lucent partnership, including some history on Apple's own investigation of wireless networking, but everyone seems to be assuming high bandwidth. As for us, we still happen to think that wireless remote controls are pretty cool, so we'll keep quiet. ;-)