Category: Macintosh

So I made a quick trip to MediaGuide, the Denver Mac retailer who’s closing shop. Was I apalled at what I saw there? Yes. Was I surprised? No. I don’t know about you, but I ain’t paying $850 for a 233mhz G3 All-in-one education version computer, when I could spend 50 bucks more, get a brand new iMac with all new ports, instead of legacy ADB bullshit. The nerve of those people, I swear. I was looking for maybe an 8100 or 8500, for about 50 bucks. Those were $150, with PowerBook Duos weighing in at $250. They had a box full of what looked to be broken Duos, so I grabbed a disembodied display, took to the front to see what they wanted for it. Here’s the exchange:
ME: So, are you selling these parts over here?
HER: Yes, as parts. Working parts.
ME: What would you want for this display?
HER: Well, what would you pay for it?
ME: I was hoping to not pay anything for it, as I’m just going to hang it on my wall
HER: Oh, no, those are working displays
ME: For a computer that doesn’t even exist anymore? That’s 10 years old to begin with? Whatever.
— End of exchange —

Morons. They’re still trying to fuck you in the ass on legacy, worthless Mac products. Sorry, 808, no IICs. They had some Macintosh IIs, and a couple IIcxs, but that was it. Lots of useless beige hardware. Sucks that they’re not really treating it as a liquidation sale, otherwise everything should be dirt-cheap, like $10 for a Performa 400. Maybe I’ll stop by the last day and make some offers. The LISA was being auctioned off, with the highest current bid at $275.

So there’s this store in Denver, known to the local Macintosh-using residents as just about the only independent seller of Apple products. So if you don’t want to go to CompUSA for that RAM for your aging 9600, you go to MediaGuide. And as it seems, Media Guide is going out of business. Maybe if those fuckers weren’t total jerks, I’d care. The upside is that there’s a giant sale about to start. Who knows what I’ll end up with.

Apple has finally listened to the UNIX community and setup a site for security announcements and security reporting. This is great, since we all know UNIX gets hacked and having a company like Apple *NOT* responding or listening to security issues would cause lots of problems. I mean, the more we (and apple) know about the hacks and holes in Mac OS X the better. Leaving us to fend for ourselves and wait for updates hoping they have the security issues resolved was not something the Mac,UNIX or OpenSource community was looking forward to.

Today at Apples World Wide Developer Conference, Apple made the following announcements;

All *new* Apple systems will ship with Mac OS X pre-installed.

Apple said that the two new retail locations had more than 7,000 visitors in one weekend. They managed to take in approximately $600,000 in sales.

A new version of Mac OS X Server shipped that is based on the aqua look and feel of Mac OS X. It contains Apache, Samba, and WebObjects support.

A new 17-inch Apple Studio Display flat panel with a maximum resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels, is available for $999.

Apple lowered the price of its Cinema Display once again from $2999 to $2499.

WebObjects 5, an update to the company’s Java-based application server.

This sucks… in the last couple years or so MacWeek died completely, MacCentral sold out to ZD, MacOSRumors has gone (further) down hill, and now MacNN has sold out to some stupid mindless PC media fucks… you can read the new owners ignorant responses to MacNN readers genuine issues..

This pretty much means Macintouch is the last of the breed.

Fuck, I liked MacNN…. oh well, one less site to visit I guess… :0

The… cluster is capable of delivering over 50 GFlops of peak power, and it is based on 16 Dual PowerPC G4/450, 32 processors, 12 Gigabytes of RAM, 0.5 Terabyte of hard disk space, running Mac OS 9, over 100 Mb/s Fast Ethernet, switched by one Asanté Intracore 8000. This is probably the fastest Macintosh-based cluster in the World.

Wonder what it would run like if it used OS X.

It appears that people are starting to use Linux for movie animation. Which is weird to me, but makes sense.. better multi-threading than NT, cheaper that Irix, runs on cheaper computers than Solaris… source is more open than MacOS X, allowing personalized tweaks of the OS…. But why does it still sound strange?

From the mouth of Apple:

Apple currently has around 5% market share in personal computers. This means that out of one hundred computer users, five of them use Macs. While that may not sound like a lot, it is actually higher than both BMW’s and Mercedes-Benz’s share of the automotive market. And it equals 25 million customers around the world using Macs.

A pretty frank statement about the opening of two Apple stores this weekend, with a virtual tour of it. Nice. I can’t wait for the CO one to open.

So Apple today announced a sweet new iBook and posted an update via the Software Update control panel for both iTunes and Mac OS X that supports CD burning. 🙂