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A Matter Of Trust (5/30/00)
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It's time to play everyone's favorite game, Update Your Firmware! Yes, firmer than software but softer than hardware, it's firmware-- that ball of code that sits in read-only memory and makes your Mac tick, at a very guts-level level. Without working firmware, your modern-day Mac would never get so far as the disk on which you keep your operating system; it'd be little more than a dead chunk of polycarbonate-- a startlingly attractive dead chunk of multitextured and immaculately sculpted polycarbonate, true, but nonfunctional nonetheless. So keeping your Mac fed with the proper firmware is the right thing to do and the tasty way to do it, and Apple's got the goods: a heaping helping of firmware updates designed to keep your Mac nice and regular.
According to MacWEEK, those happy lab gnomes in Cupertino have cranked out firmware updates to address all manner of esoteric "issues" that may plague one's Mac. And they didn't want to leave anybody out, so they've just released new firmware updates for everyone. (Well, everyone with Macs less than seven or eight months old, at any rate.) So if you've got an iBook, a FireWire PowerBook, an AGP-based Power Mac G4, or a Kihei iMac (350 MHz or faster), download and install the appropriate update today-- or else the three of you looking to boot from a FireWire hard disk will be out of luck. Out of curiosity, how many iBook owners do you suppose plan on adding 256 MB DIMMs to their consumer-targeted portables?
Now, those of you who were permanently emotionally scarred by the great Blue Blocker scandal of 1999 may well be suspicious of geeks bearing gifts of shiny new firmware. (For those who may have forgotten, last year it came to light that Apple had released a firmware update for blue and white G3 systems that "inadvertently" [cough] rendered those systems incapable of booting when upgraded to G4 processors.) We admit, it looks a little suspicious when Apple releases four arguably less-than-crucial firmware updates all at once, all numbered version 2.4, covering its entire current product line. It's probably just a healthy dose of paranoia, but let's just say that if it turns out that Macs with 2.4 firmware all mysteriously combust the day after their warranties expire (after prompting the owner to purchase a replacement, of course), we won't be too surprised.
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SceneLink (2323)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/30/00 episode: May 30, 2000: Firmware! Getcher red-hot firmware here! Meanwhile, an Apple subsidiary scores a devious coup by taking over the National Fish and Wildlife Service, and Apple has yet to jump on the "advertising on fruit" bandwagon...
Other scenes from that episode: 2324: The Seat Of Power (5/30/00) Slowly but surely, Apple's making headway on its covert plan to take over the U.S. government. Until now, the most visible moves in Steve Jobs's master plan have been confined to the military; last year the Army moved its web site to a Mac running WebSTAR, and more recently rumors surfaced that Steve himself was involved in talks with the Navy to lift its ban on the purchase of Mac systems... 2325: The Future Of Fruit (5/30/00) Apple's marketing has historically been a very... bipolar experience. There have been some very successful campaigns over the years (the "Think Different" commercial, the legendary "1984" ad), but there's also been a lot of absolute dreck; that disturbing Performa infomercial in which Gramps uses the family Mac to get a girlfriend limps immediately to mind...
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