Apple Computer Inc.’s CEO Steve Jobs burdened the world’s Macintosh lovers with yet another round of good news/bad news at last week’s San Francisco Macworld exposition, where he showed off a stunning new 1-inch-thick G4 PowerBook made of jet aircraft quality titanium metal. But, my oh my, the bad news is that while you can buy these PowerBooks now for between $2,600 and $3,500, none of them will have the new Mac OS X operating system until July.
Apple stock has tanked 73 percent since Labor Day and inventories are piling up as consumers refuse to buy machines–no matter how beautiful they are–that will have obsolete operating systems in four or five months. Is this any way to “think different”?
LIVE WIRE
POCKET POWER
While Macoholics gathered in San Francisco, even more geeks flocked to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (see cover story) where the biggest hit may have been a mundane little gadget about half the size of a cell phone from an outfit called Electric Fuel Corp. The gadget is a $16 emergency battery/battery charger compatible with most of the Nokia, Motorola and Siemens cell phones in the pockets and purses of hot-wired Americans everywhere.
Once you crack the case and charge a dead phone, you get a total of three uses before the thing goes dead. Why did we have to wait so long for this box of disposable juice?
SPAM KAMIKAZES
SUICIDE BY CHAT
Vandals have just about destroyed one of the Internet’s most wonderful features, a form of instant messaging called Internet Relay Chat, which wired the world together long before the likes of America Online and the Microsoft Network came along with their instant messaging chat services.
Before IM was even a glimmer in the eyes of Bill Gates and Steve Case, people used IRC to bring news from Moscow during the collapse of communism in 1993 and uncensored eyewitness accounts from Baghdad and Israel during the Gulf War. Now unidentifiable hackers are blitzing the best IRC operation still surviving, the Undernet (www.undernet.org).
Insiders blame “suicidal” propeller heads among the computer-savvy people who use IRC and who have nothing better to do than launch denial-of-service attacks by bombarding IRC groups with spam.
AEROBICS SHY?
Sit on this
You read it here first last April, and now Microsoft and the La-Z-Boy company are finally shipping the Explorer, a couch potato’s ultimate fantasy. It’s a recliner that comes complete with holders for snacks and beverages, a built-in TV remote and a wireless WebTV Internet surfing keyboard setup. All it lacks for us overweight screen addicts is a pocket for our nitroglycerine pills.
