MacEdition ProNews December 20, 2000
by MacEdition Staff (feedback)
Been there, done that, the t-shirt didn’t fit
Salon has seen fit to write about Apple’s options in the processor market. We’re glad they did. After all, the performance gap, real or perceived, is important to those who watch Apple (and AAPL). There’s a problem though. Mr. Simonds seems to think that AMD could be Apple’s savior. Soup thought otherwise over a month ago. Take a read; see what you think.
Communicating until you’re blue in the tooth
It’s a wireless world. We have cordless phones, wireless phones, cell phones, pagers, PDAs, and hybrids. But have they made life any easier?
Of course, the answer would be “yes” in specific instances, but the whole promise of doing whatever you want, wherever you want (electronically speaking, of course) still hasn’t been quite realized, unless you’re a shepherd with an unusually broad worldview.
Enter several companies who think they can change that. PCWorld regales us with tales of Bluetooth-enabled shopping malls, restaurants, airports, and such. Sound familiar? It should, as this is territory previously thought to belong to proponents of 802.11b (better known as AirPort, and other names).
Forget the specific technology differences behind the two competitors – the first to make it useful will be the winner in the different spaces. The mall is wired (so to speak) for Bluetooth? Guess which tech kids are going to ask for by name?
Paging Captain Nemo
Mac OS X just got a bit more competition. Eazel and Sun have agreed to incorporate Nautilus (you know, that spiffy UI that former Mac folks are creating) into Solaris. From the press release: “The combination of GNOME and Nautilus will provide Linux and Solaris users with the same, easy-to-use user environment across both platforms. In addition, Eazel and Sun will work together to improve the accessibility, internationalization and documentation of Nautilus.”
There’s been some discussion about Mac OS X being attractive because of the GUI it will put on top of a traditionally user-unfriendly OS core. While this agreement doesn’t do anything to make the machines easier to administrate, perhaps the genesis of a unified UI for the Unix variants is emerging. If that is the case, does Mac OS X compete well?