As the Apple Turns: Scene 4258: Panther's Featurectomy (10/9/03)

Panther's Featurectomy (10/9/03)

The Steve giveth, and the Steve taketh away. Sure, all we like sheep are getting Panther on October 24th, which is more than two months ahead of the tail end of Steve's original "before the end of the year" commandment, and we can all give thanks that we'll be solemnly Exposé-ing well in advance of Dick Clark counting down the drop of that big sparkly ball. But there's a price to pay for our early admission into Pantherland, and we're not talking about the $129 cover charge; it turns out that at least one fairly nifty feature will be missing from 10.3.0: "Home on iPod."

We can hear you now: "What on who-Pod?" Which is actually a perfectly valid (albeit goofily phrased) question, since "Home on iPod" wasn't a feature demonstrated, mentioned, or even subtly hinted at in Steve's original Panther sermon last June-- nor did it pop up anywhere in Apple's well-thumbed online Panther preview. In fact, as far as we know, the only place it's ever been officially mentioned by name outside the cloisters of One Infinite Loop is in the company's fresh-and-steamin' Panther pages that surfaced after yesterday's ship date announcement. The only problem is, all mention of "Home on iPod" has apparently been surgically excised from Apple's web site since yesterday.

No, really, it's true! MacRumors noticed that both the feature's name and a paragraph-long description originally showcased on one of Apple's new Panther pages has since vanished completely-- but MacRumors mined its browser cache and came up with a mirror of the original version, so now you, too, can enlighten yourselves about Panther's secret missing feature-- even as Apple's web gnomes get drawn, quartered, and set on fire for the umpteenth time for posting something that they evidently shouldn't have. (Frankly, given the number of slip-ups in recent years, we're amazed any of those little guys are still left. They must breed like bunnies.)

The idea's pretty simple: toss your home directory on your iPod, carry it around with you everywhere you go, and whenever you happen to run into a Pantheriffic Mac (you know, like on a bench at the bus station, or in one of the stalls of a gas station bathroom-- they're everywhere, right?), you can plug in your 'Pod and log right in, just as if you were at home. Note that this is at least twenty degrees cooler than merely using the iPod as a portable hard drive on which to tote your files; with "Home on iPod," you can apparently log in to foreign Macs on which you have no account-- with zero setup, the Mac sees your iPod and automatically lets you log in with your home account of "chunkylover53" or whatever. Better still, if you happen to edit any files in your home directory on the iPod, the changes are synced back to your home Mac when you reconnect.

Or, rather, they would be, provided that the "Home on iPod" feature actually existed in the first place. Bummer, huh? Maybe it just didn't get finished in time, and it'll show up in 10.3.1. Or perhaps, like Brigadoon, it is there, but it's only visible for one day each one hundred years. Only time will tell...

SceneLink (4258)

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The above scene was taken from the 10/9/03 episode:

October 9, 2003: Panther's only two weeks away-- but what happened to that "Home on iPod" feature we were all so desperately waiting for but never heard of? Meanwhile, every sign imaginable points to a launch of the iTunes Music Store for Windows in one week's time, and Apple rolls out a new iPod TV commercial that proves once and for all that silhouettes can boogie down like nobody's beeswax...

Other scenes from that episode:

4259: Awww, The Mystery Is Gone (10/9/03) So we're getting Panther in a couple of weeks, mysterious missing feature notwithstanding. Now what about the other "before the end of this year" goody that Steve promised? We speak, of course, of an iTunes Music Store accessible by those poor saps still using Windows...
4260: Pretty, Funky, Pretty Funky (10/9/03) Aw, nurtz-- we missed it! It seems that Apple broadcast a new iPod commercial last night on select stations, but apparently not the station we were watching. Serves us right for tuning in to sports instead of our usual steady diet of sitcoms and drama, but unfortunately we had a biological imperative to watch the Cubs swat the Marlins so thoroughly that all that remained of the once-proud ball team was a dark smudge and a vague fishy smell...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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