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The Future Is Rhapsody (4/11/98)
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Your friendly AtAT staff were among the thousands of outraged Apple-watchers who were incredulous to hear that the next-generation Rhapsody OS was being positioned strongly as a server operating system, not as a user OS. Since then, those who were willing to scour the 'net for whatever tiny and disparate scraps of information they could find, were able to assemble those scraps into a scenario that, while unconfirmed, is a very reasonable one as far as Apple's OS strategy is concerned. That's why we're pretty relaxed about the whole thing these days; "Rhapsody" indeed will be a server OS, but the Mac OS will basically be Rhapsody for users starting sometime next year, when the "Sonata" release is shipped.
This week's Rhapsody Roundup does a great job of explaining how the puzzle pieces will probably fit together. Sonata will have Rhapsody's core, with an interface that is Mac OS through and through. It will continue to run virtually all of today's Mac OS applications via the Blue Box (which by then may be completely transparent to the end user), most likely at speeds equal to or faster than they run in Mac OS 8.1 on the same hardware. What this means is that die-hard Mac OS users will gain the modern OS features of Rhapsody, while retaining the interface and services of the Mac OS. Since it's Rhapsody's underpinnings under the hood, however, it'll be a cinch for people to add "power user" features like a UNIX command line to Sonata just by downloading a terminal application.
The official story of Apple's software strategy will arrive at next month's Worldwide Developer Conference from the lips of Steve Jobs himself. Until then, this is all speculation, even though it's heavily-researched and extremely well-thought-out speculation. That being said, we at AtAT are more than pleased with the possibilities.
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SceneLink (619)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 4/11/98 episode: April 11, 1998: According to one publication, Uncle Steve managed to alienate pretty much the entire broadcasting community in one fell swoop. Meanwhile, scandalous new photos of the Wall Street Powerbooks are circulating in the seedier online communities, and Rhapsody will don a Mac OS disguise starting in 1999...
Other scenes from that episode: 617: That Whole NAB Thing (4/11/98) While some Apple-watchers may have been impressed and gratified to see Steve Jobs' NAB keynote last week, apparently that sentiment was largely absent among NAB executives and members. Faithful viewer Allen Denette was kind enough to tell us to look up last Thursday's issue of "Communications Daily," which was less than kind to Uncle Steve's Travelling Quicktime Show... 618: The Curves of Wall Street (4/11/98) Whatever happened to Wall Street? Many of us have been waiting for it for the better part of a year, some even longer. Apparently our sources who told us back in March that we wouldn't see the new Powerbooks until May were quite correct...
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