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A Mac In Me's Clothing (9/19/00)
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 Thank heaven that faithful viewer Milo Auckerman has a boring job, or he may never have discovered the strange doings over at CNET's Help.com. He was cruising through the operating systems section when he noticed something a tad... askew. In the upper right corner of the page, there's a link to a review of the Mac OS X public beta-- but it shows the Windows Me logo instead. (The link was still there at broadcast time, but we've included a screenshot here just in case it vanishes.)
Now, as we see it, there are two possible explanations for this odd mismatch. The first is that CNET wouldn't know its hinder from its elbow, let alone be able to distinguish between two operating systems from competing companies. But given that one of them is a beta of an industrial-strength operating system from Apple, only available online and (for a few days last week) in Paris, while the other is a actual consumer release of Windows from Microsoft available in stores all over the globe, that's an uncharitable stretch of the imagination. Could CNET truly be so slow-witted as to think these two products are one and the same, just because each was released within a day of the other? Perish forbid.
No, given that nobody could be that dim, we figure the second explanation is correct: namely, that Apple is doing everything it can to fulfill its massive and overwhelming backlog of beta orders in a reasonable time frame, and rather than wait another two days while more Mac OS X boxes get printed, the company has resorted to shipping copies of the beta in unused Windows Me boxes instead. Yes, kiddies, when your beta order finally shows up on your doorstep, don't have a coronary when you find a Window Me box inside; packaging is only skin-deep. And thanks to the insightful and timely reporting by CNET, now we're all prepared for the shock.
(There's also the remote possibility that it was neither stupidity nor insightful reporting, but merely a casual mistake-- but where's the fun in that?)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 9/19/00 episode: September 19, 2000: Repeated shipping confirmations make the public beta orders even more surreal, but at least Apple's racking up a ton of them. Meanwhile, Apple licenses Amazon's 1-Click technology to make the Apple Store a truly dangerous prospect, and CNET can't seem to keep its operating systems straight...
Other scenes from that episode: 2556: "The Order" By Franz Kafka (9/19/00) Okay, this is just getting too bizarre for words. Last Wednesday morning, we awoke from unsettling dreams to trudge downstairs and order the Mac OS X public beta from the Apple Store. While we can't include the $29.95 price tag for beta software too out of the ordinary (somehow that just utterly failed to surprise us), little did we suspect that everything after clicking the "Add To Order" button would be weird enough to make Franz Kafka hang up his pen, because truth is indeed more surreal than fiction... 2557: Click Your Savings Goodbye (9/19/00) Meanwhile, surprised and stung by the boos generated by his keynote mention of the Apple Store, Uncle Steve scrambles to make Apple's online sales experience that much more lickable for the recklessly e-buying public...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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