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Prepare for Reckoning (3/16/98)
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Despite the discontinuance of most of Apple's Powerbook lineup this weekend, the new Wall Street and Main Street lines (and the speed-bumped 2400, code-named Mighty Cat) failed to materialize today. That's not too surprising, since Steve Jobs is giving his much-ballyhooed Seybold Keynote address tomorrow morning, and what better time to introduce nifty new hardware? (We're going to try like the dickens to listen to the webcast, but it seems unlikely that we'll be lucky enough to get through...) In the meantime, though, there's a huge gap in Apple's Powerbook offerings. True, there are plenty of these newly-discontinued models in the channel waiting to be snapped up, but officially, there's been a day's dearth of heavy-duty laptops in Apple's lineup. How can Apple ever make up for such a heinous omission?
By delivering Wall Street, that's how. The latest performance notes from O'Grady's PowerPage are too incredible to believe (and you know we're not the overly-skeptical type). The O'Grady's team took the fastest Mac currently available (the 266 MHz G3), clock-chipped it to 292 MHz, and tweaked its bus to 83 MHz before adding a high-end ultra-wide SCSI card and a 10K RPM drive. This "úber-desktop" MacBenched an amazing 1025 on the CPU test, over twice as fast as our own 200 MHz 604e / 1 MB L2 system. What does this have to do with Wall Street? Turns out that the 250 MHz Wall Street is an astounding 33% faster than this speedy desktop. (Jaw drops to the floor with a "clang," tongue unrolls like a carpet, steam shoots from ears.)
We're basing this entirely on O'Grady's say-so, and hopefully the numbers on the released shipping systems will confirm their results. So, starting tomorrow (we hope), Apple's fastest Mac will be a Powerbook: sign of the Apocalypse, or what?
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 3/16/98 episode: March 16, 1998: Tales of Wall Street's mighty speed continue to shock and amaze all who hear them. Meanwhile, a speedy new minitower joins Apple's lineup, and a crafty nature photographer captures the only known photo of Artemis in the wild...
Other scenes from that episode: 541: Blazing Desktops (3/16/98) Actually, though, we can't be sure that Wall Street will really be the fastest shipping Mac-- at least, not now that Apple's added a new "workstation-class" Powermac G3 to its price list. According to MacNN, the new minitower showed up over the weekend, sporting a 300 MHz G3 processor, a full megabyte of backside L2 cache, 128 MB of RAM, two 4 GB drives connected to an ultra-wide SCSI card, a 24x CD-ROM drive, an ix3D Ultimate Rez 8 MB graphics card, and built-in 10/100 Ethernet... 542: Artemis Unveiled (3/16/98) Okay, so between Wall Street and the G3 300, Apple's got the high end covered. Will they continue to ignore the low end, which is the fastest-growing market for personal computers? Yes, there's the NC project, which Apple has yet to formally acknowledge...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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