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Seven-Slot PowerBooks (6/28/98)
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There sure has been a lot of ruckus caused by Apple not selling any high-end Macs with enough PCI slots for professional use. The final resolution appears to be that Apple will not design any new systems with six slots, like their old 9500 and 9600 machines; instead, its pro-level G3 systems to be released this fall will ship with only four slots, and professionals who need more will have to purchase a third-party PCI expansion chassis. As long as Apple follows through on its apparent plan to work with the third-party vendors to ensure that the chassis are completely compatible, and if they can provide such a chassis as a build-to-order option via the Apple Store and also bundle it in certain high-end configurations, everything should be cool.
In fact, PCI expansion chassis aren't a new idea; MacCentral describes one such offering from a company called MAGMA, who has just announced their PCI expansion systems for the PowerBook G3 Series of laptops. For about a grand, you can add three or seven PCI slots to your nifty new PowerBook. The expansion unit connects to the PowerBook via one of the media bays, so you'll have to give up either your CD-ROM/DVD drive or your floppy drive while you're connected, but hey, how often do you really need that floppy?
It's a neat idea: the 292 MHz G3 PowerBooks aren't just really fast laptops; they're really fast computers. Period. There's no real reason a G3 PowerBook couldn't double as your full-time desktop powerhouse system, especially now that you can give it a whopping seven PCI slots. That's more than any shipping Mac has ever offered. So let's hear it: anyone out there planning to do full-scale high-end video production work on a PCI-enabled PowerBook? Now that would be cool.
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SceneLink (815)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 6/28/98 episode: June 28, 1998: Apple's sleek Studio Displays has the CNET reviewers panting like wolves in a Tex Avery cartoon, but the price tag leaves them cold. Meanwhile, Microsoft officially acknowledges an interesting security bug in Word 98 (though no fix is yet available), and if you're really a slot-junky, why not add seven PCI slots to your new PowerBook G3?...
Other scenes from that episode: 813: Evolution in Action (6/28/98) With all the refocusing that's gone on at Apple over the past couple of years, it's easy to forget sometimes that they're more than just a computer company. Over the years, Apple has pioneered lots of imaging technologies that are widespread and commonplace today... 814: I Sent You WHAT? (6/28/98) For those of you who use Word 98, Microsoft has officially acknowledged the latest fun glitch to rise to the surface. You may have heard by now that Word 98 (and, apparently, Word 6 and some other non-Microsoft applications like PageMaker and Quark Xpress) has a nasty habit of inserting seemingly random chunks of data from your hard disk into saved document files; the data isn't visible in Word, but you can see it if you open the file in BBEdit or a data editor like HexEdit...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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