Brace yourselves, folks, because this is going to come as a terrible shock. You already know that Mac OS X is lacking on a number of fronts (DVD playback, solid audio support, a high-level input device API like Game Sprockets, etc.) but most of the holes will get filled in over time. There is, however, one omission that's apparently going to stay unfilled for the forseeable future; according to a MacCentral article, "telephony is dead on the Mac." Bing Software (the makers of such Mac telephony products as MegaPhone and PhonePro) spoke to Apple about adding the necessary hooks to Mac OS X, but reportedly Apple responded that "telephony was no longer an interest to them not their customer base." Consternation! Uproar!

Or maybe, not so much. We wouldn't be surprised if most of you are still scratching your heads and asking, "What's telephony?" Basically, it involves plugging your phone line into your Mac and running software that lets you use your computer as a speakerphone, answering machine, etc. It's entirely possible that Apple is correct, and that the vast majority of Mac users would rather talk into an actual telephone than into their computers; we can't speak for everybody, but personally we're having a tough time getting particularly upset about this development (or, rather, lack of same), no matter how well telephony might seem to fit into the whole "digital hub" picture.

Back when we were still giddy with the blazing speed of the 200 MHz 604e in our brand-spankin'-new PowerTower Pro, we actually did get a hold of Apple's GeoPort Telecom Adapter, also referred to as the "Pod." Most people who used a Pod used it strictly as a 28.8 Kbps software-based modem (albeit one with, we eventually discovered, a much slower effective connection that a real hardware modem). Its less-publicized use, though, was for telephony applications, and for a while we experimented with using our PowerTower as a combination speakerphone, answering service, and fax machine, all via the Pod and Apple's bundled software. It was kind of cool, in much the same way that one's first exposure to Speakable Items is kind of cool-- but it got old pretty quickly. To be honest, once the "wow factor" wore off, it was a bigger hassle sitting down in front of the Mac and using the software than it was to pick up the phone or hit the "new messages" button on our decidedly low-tech answering machine.

Don't get us wrong; if you'd like to run telephony apps on your Mac, we'd like you to have the option to do so. But if this is a matter of priorities over at Apple, and telephony's just waaaay down on the development list under stuff like "DVD playback" and "a Finder that's faster than a snail on Quaaludes," then Apple's probably made the right choice for the time being. And anyway, is Apple down on telephony? Don't forget, Apple went so far as to register IPHONE.ORG, a domain name that's been pointing to Apple's own home page for the past year and a half. We're guessing that Apple thinks its customers would rather focus on Internet telephony (i.e. phone calls for free over the 'net) than anything involving landline phones. Just a thought, though.