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Media Saturation (10/28/99)
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If you're dying of thirst in this Mac news drought, fear not-- as you well know, news isn't the only wavelength in the Mac-presence spectrum. Don't forget the wild world of entertainment! After all, when you're flipping channels through your vast cable TV selection, do you really linger over CNN when there's a showing of back-to-back Mama's Family episodes on the TBS Superstation? We thought not. So don't fret; just start channel-surfing and you're sure to run into a Mac sighting sooner or later.
See, the odds are in your favor these days, because Apple's newfound obsession with brightly-colored translucent products has made the company even more popular with Hollywood producers looking to stick a computer on the set of their show or movie. Really, if you're in charge of set design for, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and if anyone can get me that job, I'm on the next plane out there!), which are you going to throw on a dormroom desk: a beige, bulgy-looking Compaq Presario, or the simple lines, classic curves, and eye-catching colors of an iMac? Ooooh, tough choice. And that's why Macs are appearing on at least 56 shows this television season, according to an Entertainment Weekly article-- it's the Macs themselves, not any kind of bribe. At least, so says J.J. Abrams, cocreator of Felicity, one of the most Mac-friendly shows on the tube: "There's something human and friendly and optimistic about Macintosh." In fact, the only drawback we can think of to using Macs on the set is the way that the stars might get upstaged by a computer that's prettier than they are.
56 shows. Compare that to IBM's slice of the Onscreen Pie: a piddly 24 shows feature IBM computers instead. Too bad these numbers don't translate into market share percentages, right? As for how IBM feels about their products being basically shunned by Hollywood, spokesperson Trink Guarino (?!) says, "We don't feel sad or left out." Oh, sure, IBM's keeping a brave face, but we all know they're really crying inside... It always hurts to be the last one picked for the stickball team.
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SceneLink (1876)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 10/28/99 episode: October 28, 1999: In the midst of a slow week in the U.S., rumors of another Apple no-show sends Mac vendors and third-party developers into a seething frenzy. Meanwhile, back on the tube, Macs are set to surface on a whopping 56 shows this season, and Apple lab gnomes work feverishly to get multiprocessing Macs ready for a February rollout...
Other scenes from that episode: 1875: 3rd Time's The... D'oh! (10/28/99) Wow, this sure has been a pretty dead week for Apple watchers. Not much of anything really happened, and we can only surmise that after the whole "G4 Speed Dump" fiasco, Steve and the gang are taking some time to cool their jets before poking their heads back out into public... 1877: Better Than One (10/28/99) When the G3 processor first surfaced, its performance was startlingly better than the 603e and 604e processors that we in the Mac world were used to. We remember when we first test-drove a G3-upgraded 7500 several months before Apple released the Power Mac G3...
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