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Twiddling For Dollars (11/10/99)
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Thumbs are pretty cool, aren't they? You can use them to hitch rides with potential serial killers if you don't feel like walking. You can thumb-wrestle with your coworkers for money and lose the kids' college fund to Lenny "Crusher" Wachowski. You can even use your nice, evolved, opposable thumbs to hold a stylus in one hand and a post-Newton Apple-branded handheld computer in the other-- or, at least you could if Apple would ever get up off their collective kiester and ship one. In the meantime, you can twiddle your thumbs and wait.
But warm up those thumbs if you're really planning on twiddling until Apple ships a new handheld, because it looks like you're going to be twiddling for a long, long time. First Apple tried to buy Palm-- no go. Then Steve Jobs made an offer to buy Handspring, the Palm OS licensee started up by the Palm founders. Again, no luck. So then we had heard that Apple and Handspring were working together on a new Apple-branded Palm OS device based on Handspring's new expandable Visor product. And we waited patiently (or not so patiently) for the fruits of that collaboration.
Unfortunately, now MacProvider is quoting a source at Handspring who reports that, due both to the overwhelming success of the Visor and difficulties working with Apple, the co-engineered Apple handheld project has been scrapped completely, at least for the time being. If that's true, then Apple has a couple of choices: they can plan to wait for Handspring to decide it has the time and resources to devote to the Apple project, or they can say bye-bye to Handspring and take another tack. Either way, it sounds like our hopes for an Apple handheld are being pushed ever further into the future, and we wish Apple would just bite the bullet and resurrect the Newton in a smaller incarnation, or something. Our thumbs are getting tired from all this twiddling.
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SceneLink (1904)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 11/10/99 episode: November 10, 1999: At first we thought it was a joke, but nope-- Compaq really did name their new computer that. Meanwhile, rumor has it that Apple's development effort with Handspring has stalled out, meaning no new Apple handheld for a while, and a Gallup poll shows Bill Gates and Microsoft to be more popular than ever (though the opinion on the Web seems quite different)...
Other scenes from that episode: 1903: It Kinda Hurts, Too (11/10/99) First of all, we'd just like to take this opportunity to apologize in advance for any typos that may make it into today's episode, but your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff is operating at a severe disadvantage right now: we've been struck blind... 1905: Vote Gates in 2000 (11/10/99) Ahhh, polls! Nothing tells you more about what people are thinking than a nice, scientific, unbiased poll-- in theory, anyway. In AtAT's opinion, unbiased polls are sort of like leprechauns: few sober people actually claim to have seen one, but apparently some people still seem to think they exist...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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