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Oh Yeah, One More Thing... (1/10/01)
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Lastly, if you were as blown away by the Stevenote as we were, you may not have noticed a certain omission from the list of expected new developments. It wasn't until much later (when faithful viewer Chris Frank wrote in to remind us) that we came to a startling realization: Mac OS 9.1, widely considered an absolute lock as a candidate for an Expo announcement, was nowhere to be seen. Geez, first Mac OS X gets held back until March 24th (albeit with some spiffy interface enhancements that make us feel a lot better about Aqua), and now Mac OS 9.1 is MIA as well? It's almost enough to make us fear for the health and well-being of the operating system development team. Perhaps the flu is rampant?
But no-- fear not, because as faithful viewer Ryan James first pointed out, Mac OS 9.1 is done and available both on CD-ROM and as a free download from Apple's web site. It appeared mere hours after the end of Steve's keynote address, which makes us think that either it still wasn't quite finished when Steve took the stage, or Steve just had way too much other stuff to talk about to bother mentioning an operating system update that's rather short on the "gee whiz" bells and whistles. Or maybe he just didn't want to have things thrown at him for mentioning that the 72 MB download is split into fifteen chunks, for reasons we have yet to unearth.
In any event, our repeated attempts to grab even one part of the 9.1 updater have yet to bear fruit; usually we can't even load the download page, and the one time we managed to get that far, we still couldn't get an actual file transfer going. Odds are that most of us are going to have to wait until the demand cools off a little before we can grab the update-- all fifteen parts and 72 MB of it. Hmmm, suppose that Apple's slowed down its servers on purpose to get people to pay for the CD-ROM version instead? We notice that the upgrade order form sure loads quickly enough...
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SceneLink (2789)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 1/10/01 episode: January 10, 2001: It may not be a subnotebook, per se, but the PowerBook G4 comes darn close and is chock full of goodies. Meanwhile, Apple narrows the megahertz gap with its new 733 MHz Power Mac G4-- assuming it really ships next month. Also, Apple's new consumer-targeted "digital hub" applications are most useful (or only available) on the company's professional workstations, and while Mac OS 9.1 was a keynote no-show, it is available and ready for download (assuming you can get through)...
Other scenes from that episode: 2786: 5.3 Lb. of Raw, Titanium Sex (1/10/01) Much of the time, the challenge in producing a new episode of AtAT day after day is coming up with enough material. You know how sometimes your nightly news runs stories on shockers like "your bank may be charging you fees for ATM use," or "eating raw pork may be hazardous to your health"?... 2787: Talk To Us When It Ships (1/10/01) Dying of thirst for more megahertz? Well, drink deeply; yesterday saw the end of an eighteen-month-long dry spell in the quest for higher clock speeds. Much to our surprise and delight, CNET's original report that Steve would take the wraps off of a 733 MHz Power Mac G4 turned out to be right on the money-- and that's a really good thing, since we were losing the battle to keep our expectations down to the "dual-processor 600 MHz" level... 2788: Digital Hubs And Killer Apps (1/10/01) How about Apple's new goal of evolving the personal computer into the hub of our increasingly digital lifestyle? iMovie was a big step in that direction, with its ability to transform a simple digital camcorder into a tool of unbounded creativity and purpose...
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