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Breaking the Drought (9/7/98)
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It could be the end of an era-- or the end of an error, more likely. Ever since their introduction last May, high-end PowerBook G3's have been harder to find than a Mac at OfficeMax. As of last week, several customers who had placed orders for the zippy new laptops were still waiting for the goods, and the Great PowerBook Drought of 1998 may go down in history as one of Apple's biggest availability botches ever.
Last week, however, during his Seybold keynote, Steve Jobs introduced new speed-bumped PowerBook configurations which standardize on 14.1" screens with multiple resolution capability, add faster video and 3D support, and include speedier G3 processors complete with backside cache. And lo and behold, according to O'Grady's PowerPage, these replacement G3's are apparently available. Now. Seriously! At least, their source at MacConnection claims that their availability of the 233 and 266 MHz units is "excellent," with the 300 MHz machines due to arrive any day now. (Yes, we've heard that routine before, but for some reason we actually believe it this time.) MacConnection, at least, expects to receive enough 300 MHz PowerBooks to fill all of their backorders for the original 292 MHz configuration, and still have enough left over to sell to new customers.
That, of course, assumes that the people who have been waiting for four months to receive their merchandise will be willing to switch their orders to the new 300 MHz model. (Not that it seems particularly unlikely; anyone who hasn't cancelled their order by now is a paragon of patience, anyway.) To try to sweeten the deal, Apple has reportedly decided to include a free floppy drive module in every order that gets switched up. We're not sure how much of an inducement that really is, though, considering that the 292 MHz PowerBook included a floppy drive in the first place. Still, the real difference between the latest PowerBooks and the last ones is pretty straightforward: if you order one of the new ones, you might actually get to use it within a week or so.
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SceneLink (993)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 9/7/98 episode: September 7, 1998: Amazingly enough, it appears that Apple's new PowerBooks are actually available. Meanwhile, as some businesses deploy current iMacs on the corporate desktop, Apple's engineers are hard at work on a mutant version uniquely adapted for that environment, and the U.S. Navy uses iMacs for Internet access, unknowingly feeding Redmond with the information it needs for world conquest...
Other scenes from that episode: 994: Business, As Usual (9/7/98) By all accounts, less than a month out of the gate, the iMac is a big success. Apple's selling a ton of them (several tons, if you want to Think Literal), primarily to existing Mac owners who wanted to upgrade their older units, but a significant number seem to be going to first-time computer buyers and PC users fed up with all that DLL and Registry nonsense... 995: Security Leak (9/7/98) Who says the armed forces can't think differently? According to NoBeige, the U.S. Navy has decided to use iMacs for its new Navy Connection Service, which sounds basically like a Kinkos type of rent-a-computer-for-an-hour sort of deal...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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