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Shopping For Talent (7/11/99)
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You can throw more evidence on the pile that Steve Jobs isn't down on handhelds in general; sure, he nixed the Newton, but that was a Sculley project and therefore had to be destroyed. Since then Steve's admitted publicly that he tried to buy Palm from 3Com, which might have been very cool-- but 3Com wasn't selling. Instead, we've all heard again and again that Apple is now working with Palm on some kind of cobranded handheld. It might be something as dull as a standard Palm device with a fruit-flavored case and an Apple logo on it (and even that would be welcomed!), but it also might be something much, much nicer, integrating the best features of the now-defunct (but still Apple-owned) Newton technology while maintaining complete compatibility with the vast stores of Palm software.
Whatever it is, we're looking forward to it, and the irrepressible skeptic inside us is somewhat appeased by the new rumor at O'Grady's PowerPage that Steve "very recently" tried to buy Handspring, the new company created by the folks who started Palm and left after the 3Com buyout. We don't know exactly what Handspring does, since at broadcast time, their web site consisted of nothing more than the phrase "the event log file is full," but we assume the rumored buyout attempt was one more move on Steve's part to get Apple back into the handheld computer market that it pretty much created with the Newton MessagePad in 1993 or so.
We're still hearing lots of buzz that, in addition to the P1 unveiling that everyone's expecting at Jobs' keynote address, there may also be a surprise Palm-related announcement. As far as we're concerned, when it comes to Jobsian keynotes, anything is possible and nothing should be ruled out. We're trying not to get our hopes up too high, though it's tough to stop dreaming of leaving the Expo with a brand-new Apple PDA...
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SceneLink (1653)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 7/11/99 episode: July 11, 1999: P1 specs are a dime a dozen in these last few days before the Expo, but what's real and what's fake? Meanwhile, Apple experiments with the possibility of creating an "iMac on a chip," and did Steve Jobs try to buy the company started by the Palm founders?...
Other scenes from that episode: 1651: The Honest Truth (7/11/99) There's only just over a week to go before Steve Jobs' big keynote and the expected unveiling of the iMac for those on the go-- the P1 consumer portable. And as the finish line draws ever closer, the sheer volume of "leaked" information about Apple's Next Big Thing™ is enough to choke most larger land mammals... 1652: Pinching Pennies (7/11/99) While these days few people are nuts enough to claim that the iMac isn't a smash success, back when it was first announced (and continuing all the way through its first couple of months on the shelves) there was no shortage of naysayers predicting a spectacular flop...
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