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Vaporware Systems (9/25/97)
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Been saving your nickels and dimes for a blazingly-fast PowerMac 9600/350? The dream was not to be, friend... MacInsider has the exclusive-- the speedy Mach 5 model is due to be discontinued on October 10th. The rationale? Not enough chips to go around to fill demand. What's more, it appears that Apple knew that this would happen all along, and only announced the product to compete with Power Computing for bragging rights to "the fastest desktop computer in the world."
You may have noticed that Apple Marketing equates "fastest" with "highest clock speed," whether or not the chip is actually measurably faster. Remember the 6500/300 ads that claimed that machine was the fastest? Yes, there was a little asterisked disclaimer stating that the comparison was based solely on clock speed and that "real-world performance may vary." But there were several >200MHz 604e machines shipping at the time that would have stomped the 6500's curvy butt into the concrete. This bizarre criterion may explain Apple's decision to use 350 MHz Mach 5 604e's in its top-of-the-line system, rather than the slower clock-speed (yet much faster overall) 750 chips. Of course, since the Mac press isn't a pack of total imbeciles, they found that the 9600/350 was trounced soundly by pre-production 750 clones in the works by Power Computing and Motorola, and reported as much.
So, what to do? Refuse to certify the 750 clones. You know what happened next. And now, with the threat of competition gone, Apple is free to discontinue the model they only created to compete with the cloners.
Bottom line, it looks like the 9600/350 is harder to obtain than Janeane Garafalo's home phone number. (Email us if you have a lead on either commodity.)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 9/25/97 episode: September 25, 1997: (Sorry—this was before we started writing intro text for each episode!)
Other scenes from that episode: 22: BeBox? BeOS? Just Be (9/25/97) Be, the up-and-coming contender in the desktop OS match, has been wooing developers with sweet words for a while now-- and backing up those words with action. AtAT staff attended the last Be Developers' Conference, and we can tell you that droves of soon-to-be-ex-Mac developers were swooning before the promise of a totally modern, fully multithreaded OS that runs on PPC and Intel-- one that is written by dedicated, focused programmers that listen to developer feedback and respond quickly to suggestions and bug reports... 23: NC? Not Cwite... (9/25/97) Wow, do I even need to say it? Larry Ellison, the NC Poster Boy, had what might have been the worst day of his professional career on Tuesday. Techweb has the story. In a nutshell, pretend you're about to give a huge demo of how cool network computers are...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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