•          Apple Canada began taking orders May 16th for Newton ROM up- grades. To ship by mid-June, the upgrade will give existing Canadian Newton 
owners MessagePad 110 functionality (features such as deferred handwriting 
recognition and letter-by-letter recognition), the 1.3 operating system, and a 
choice of two out of four software titles:
          • Money Magazine Business Forms
          • Money Magazine Financial Assistant
          • Notion Newton List Manager
          • Either the Newton Connection Kit for Macintosh (2.0) or for Windows (1.0)
To order a Newton Upgrade, call 1-800-263-3394. The cost is $149.99 (Cdn); GST, PST and shipping costs extra. When the units begin to ship in June, Apple expects the turn around time to be 7-10 working days. For an extra $50, Apple will back-up and restore the data in your Newton. Otherwise, they are assuming you have backed the Newton up yourself or do not care if you lose data stored in the machine. Warranty on the upgraded Newton MessagePad is 90 days.
(In the U.S., the MessagePad upgrade can be obtained for $99 by calling 1-800-SOS-APPL)

•          Apple Canada, Inc., is finally offering a Power Macintosh configuration  which is truly DOS/Windows compatible. The Power Macintosh 6100/60 is now 
available with 16MB RAM, a 250MB hard drive and SoftWindows. It’s a good deal, 
too: The 6100/16MB/250HD/SoftWindows bundle is only $350 more expensive than the standard 6100/60 with only 8MB RAM and 250MB hard drive. Given that 8MB of RAM is close to $600 and the suggested retail price of SoftWindows is approximately $400, customers can save almost $700 by buying this new bundle.

•          Apple Canada, Inc., has introduced its first PowerPC-based server. The  Apple Workgroup Server 9150, equipped with an 80MHz PowerPC 601 proces-
sor, is similar in industrial design to the highly-expandable Quadra 900/950 
and Apple Workgroup Server 95 (which can all be upgraded to the AWS 9150). Included with the 9150 are an internal CD-ROM, a DAT drive, a 512k level-2 cache, two GeoPort compatible serial ports, Ethernet, 2MB of VRAM, 24MB of RAM and two 2-gigabyte hard drives. The Apple Workgroup Server 9150 can be yours for as little as $14,000 Cdn., without keyboard or monitor.

•          Apple’s eWorld, a new online service which utilizes the metaphor of a  small town for navigation, is scheduled to debut this summer and will be included 
on the hard drives of all new Macintoshes. 

•          Recent studies by Ingram Laboratories, an independent personal computer  testing firm, have shown that Apple’s new PowerPC-based Macintoshes consist-
ently outperform comparable Pentium based-PCs in everything from spell check 
to image editing. A sample of the results:

         •
The 80MHz PowerPC-equipped Power Macintosh 8100/80 performed, on average,
             54% faster than a 66MHz Pentium-based Compaq DeskPro.
         •
The 66MHz PowerPC-equipped Power Macintosh 7100/66 performed, on average,
             38% faster than a 66MHz Pentium-based Compaq DeskPro.
         •
The 60MHz PowerPC-equipped Power Macintosh 6100/60 performed, on average, 
             5% faster than a 66MHz Pentium-based Compaq DeskPro and 24% faster than a 60MHz
             Pentium-based Compaq Deskpro.

The Ingram study also found that the Power Macintoshes offered better price/performance value than any other personal computers currently available. 

•          Apple has publicly acknowledged that it is discussing licensing its Macin- tosh technology with a number of computer manufacturers. The rumored front-
runner to build Mac clones: IBM.

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