Cupertino, Calif. - Following on the heels of the company's best-ever retail promotion, Apple is expected to make dramatic price cuts on most desktop Macs next week.
The company will slash prices up to 36 percent on the Mac IIfx, IIci, IIsi, LC and Classic II and will offer incentives on the Classic.
The cuts, sources said, reflect Apple's determination to maintain its competitive edge following the Right Now rebate program, which ends this month.
>High end.
Although originally expected to die this spring, the Mac IIfx has gotten a new lease on life from users working with slot-hungry applications. Instead of discontinuing the last six-slot Mac, Apple plans to cut IIfx pricing up to 28 percent.
>Midrange.
The IIci also has a little life left, at least until the expected debut of a higher-performance version later this year. Apple will cut the IIci 5/80 configuration to about $4,000, sources said.
And the IIsi, currently Apple's fastest-selling midrange Mac, is expected to drop about 34 percent.
>Low end.
In preparation for the April debut of an '030-based Mac LC (see MacWEEK, Jan. 20), the price of the current Mac LC will dip to about $1,700 retail, almost 36 percent off today's list price.
While the fate of the '020 LC hasn't been decided, sources said it will likely disappear when the '030 unit ships. The '030 LC is expected to retail at the '020 LC's new price.
The Classic II is likely to drop to about $2,050 for the 4/80, $1,700 for the 4/40 and $1,550 for the 2/40 configurations. There may be dealer pricing incentives or a rebate deal to lower the effective price of the newest compact Mac even further.
Retail pricing for the original Classic won't change, but buyers will pay less for the low-end model anyway, sources said, because Apple will institute either a promotional campaign or new dealer pricing that will encourage discounting.
Apple is still committed to the Classic design, sources said. Its goal is not to "PS/1-ize" the Classic design, sources said, but to boost Classic and Classic II sales. Resellers have reported slow Classic sales as a result of rebates on other Macs.
Ultimately, sources said, Apple will use the Classic to test the waters in mass merchandising, and it needs to adjust Classic pricing to better fit that channel.
"This is an extremely aggressive move on Apple's part," said Pieter Hartsook, editor of the Hartsook Letter, a Mac market report published in Alameda, Calif. "Last year's pricing went after the name-brand PC makers, now Apple's going for the second-tier clone makers. This looks like a real hit-'em-while-they're-down move on Apple's part."
(MacWEEK News, January 27, 1992, p.1) (c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form.
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Unix competitors divvy up GUI pie at UniForum '92
By Mitch Ratcliffe
San Francisco - Fierce turf battles enlivened UniForum '92, the Unix trade show held here last week as Apple, Sun Microsystems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and the Advanced Computing Environment alliance blasted one another over the future of Unix.
Each claimed its current or future operating system is the best platform for tapping the power of RISC (reduced instruction set computing)-based hardware, which is expected to dominate the market by mid-decade.
Roger Heinen, Apple vice president and general manager of Macintosh system software, said the company will preserve the Macintosh's look and feel as it moves to new generations of system software. But he also hinted that A/UX, Apple's Unix, will replace the Macintosh OS as the company's preferred server platform.
"Whether there will be an AppleShare 4.0 is a good question," he said. "It may be more practical for larger network servers to implement the AppleTalk Filing Protocol on Unix."
Heinen speared Apple nemesis Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. over Windows NT, its new RISC-based OS, which he characterized as little more than a Unix substitute.
"Taligent will not be a replacement for Unix, it will add new value," Heinen said, referring to the new object-based system being developed by the Apple-IBM Corp. OS joint venture. "I don't think the world needs Windows NT."
Sun representatives, however, called both the Apple-IBM effort and the Microsoft-ACE initiative irrelevant to users, on the grounds that Sun with its SPARC processors and its Unix-based OS already dominates the workstation market.
"Who will be Burger King to SPARC's McDonald's is the big question," said William Larson, vice president for sales and marketing at SunSoft, Sun's software subsidiary. "There is room for only two chip architectures: SPARC and Intel's."
But analysts said applications, not processor architectures, will drive the market in the 1990s.
"Applications and the interface, such as the Mac's Finder, are important to people," said Paul Johnson, software analyst for First Boston, a New York-based market research company. "Users don't care if the computer runs on a box full of apples or a RISC CPU."
Johnson said he believes NeXT Inc. and Microsoft stand the best chance for success in the OS war. "NeXT, in the hands of less of an egomaniac (than CEO Steve Jobs) could be a big contender in the Unix world," he said.
The importance of applications was underlined by the big hit of the show, the new emulation software demonstrated by Quorum Software Systems Inc. The Menlo Park, Calif., company's technology lets Mac programs run as native applications on RISC workstations from Sun, IBM or Silicon Graphics Inc. (see MacWEEK, Jan. 20).
The product made its debut with vocal support from analysts and key Mac developers, including Aldus Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc.
"Quorum did some tremendous work in moving software toward the RISC architecture," said Tim Bajarin, executive vice president of Creative Strategies Research International, a Santa Clara, Calif., market research company.
"If I were Apple, I'd be a little nervous," First Boston's Johnson said. "Quorum creates an alternative to the Apple-IBM PowerPC platform today. Let's face it, Sun stations are pretty neat."
But Apple's Heinen dismissed a threat to the Macintosh.
"[Quorum] is one of those technologies that at first blush looks perfect, but we have to take a better look at it," Heinen said. "The fact is, the Unix applications market is peanuts. Peanuts."
A Quorum competitor, Liken 1.0, also made its appearance at UniForum. Available now from Xcelerated Systems Inc. of San Diego, the $695 package lets the Mac Finder and applications run in emulation on Sun workstations.
Xcelerated said Liken uses X Window protocols running on the Sun workstation to emulate the functionality of the Macintosh Toolbox. Users must install Version 6.0.7 of the Mac OS within an X Window on the Sun desktop.
A low-end Sun station with Liken runs Mac programs at about the speed of a Mac Classic, according to Xcelerated. More-powerful workstations are correspondingly faster, the company said. The program does not support sound, serial-port communications or AppleTalk, however.
(MacWEEK News, January 27, 1992, p.1) (c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form.
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Mac movies playing serious role in business
By Neil McManus
San Francisco - QuickTime movies are more than just an entertaining diversion for Mac users who already rely on digital video to persuade, train, educate and communicate.
"People tend to overestimate the usefulness of digital video; still, it is a very good tool for persuading and motivating, and for demonstrating things that are easier to show than tell," said Nick Arnett, president of Multimedia Computing Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif.
Although the Mac's newest data type is barely a month old, QuickTime movies have already found some real-world uses:
>Training.
Allied-Signal Aerospace Co. in Phoenix is using QuickTime movies in HyperCard-based electronic manuals for factory mechanics. The company, which manufactures gas turbine engines for airplanes, has four Quadra 700s on the factory floor, and plans to expand to 10 Macintoshes on an Ethernet network.
Mechanics now click through the HyperCard stack to learn an assembly procedure instead of flipping through hefty paper manuals. The electronic manuals include an image window for graphics and QuickTime movies, a scrollable window for instructional text, and a window that lists relevant engine parts.
"The saying, 'A picture is worth a thousand words' is really true in engine manuals," said Jim Waters, a manufacturing engineer at Allied-Signal. "A real delicate procedure used to take a James Michener novel to explain on paper, but now we show mechanics the procedure in a 10-second video clip."
>Presentations, marketing.
Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc. & Co. is using QuickTime movies in a Mac-based presentation for the 300,000 tourists who visit the company's Waterbury, Vt., ice-cream factory each year.
The interactive presentation, created with DiVA Corp.'s VideoShop and HyperCard, takes visitors on an electronic tour of the factory, provides a history of the company and includes an on-screen form for ordering gifts, T-shirts and ice cream. Video footage includes shots of the television and film actor Mr. T. visiting the plant and Ronald Reagan bestowing the Small Businessmen of the Year award to the company's founders.
"We think this show will make everybody's visit more fun," said Rik Dryfoos, the company's tour-development specialist.
>Communication, education.
QuickTime movies and animations are featured in an interactive feature magazine at Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y. Journalism students are using HyperCard and MacroMind-Paracomp Inc.'s MacroMind Director 3.0 to create the magazine, called seriously interactive. In one humorous "article," a student uses video and animation to tell the story of her family's hellacious car ride from New Mexico to upstate New York.
"I feel like we're experimenting with creating a new medium," said Joan Deppa, an associate professor in Syracuse's newspaper department. "This is helping us bridge that big gulf between print and video."
Syracuse's interactive magazine will make its debut on the campuswide network this fall, and Deppa envisions interactive magazines eventually moving into the mainstream. "An interactive travel magazine on CD-ROM would be neat, and imagine an interactive Architectural Digest in which you could walk through the houses on-screen."
(MacWEEK News, January 27, 1992, p.1) (c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form.
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System 7 bug conceals files
By Raines Cohen
San Francisco - Some users of System 7 and Quadra 700s are being bugged by problems. One is major and the other minor, but both are hard to track down.
Apple last week confirmed the existence of a System 7 bug that could cause users to lose sight of files on their hard disks. The company also acknowledged that Mac Quadra 700s have been causing network slowdowns because of their non-standard implementation of AppleTalk.
>System 7.
The bug, which appears to be present in both 7.0 and 7.0.1, reportedly causes desktop file corruption.
System 7 users afflicted by the bug said that items on the hard drive disappear in the Finder but can be retrieved with the Find command if their names are known. Disk utilities such as Apple's Disk First Aid and Symantec Corp.'s Norton Utilities acknowledge that the affected disk is damaged but are unable to repair it.
It is not yet known how widespread the problem is and what circumstances and configurations trigger it; reports have been few and scattered.
"We are aware of [the bug]," said an Apple spokeswoman. "We are definitely looking into it."
Apple said users can post problem reports in the System 7 Discussion folder on AppleLink or call customer assistance at (800) 776-2333.
>Quadra 700s.
The implementation of AppleTalk in the smaller 68040 machine does not comply with Apple's own specifications. As a result, some network applications may run slower with 700s on LocalTalk or Ethernet.
"The Quadra 700 sends extra data at the end of every packet," said Ethan Berry, technical-support specialist at Farallon Computing Inc. in Emeryville, Calif. "We hope to provide an interim [software] fix to our service technicians," said an Apple spokeswoman. "Hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, a more widely distributed one will be available."
As an interim measure, according to Berry, users can install AppleTalk Version 57, which appears to bring sluggish Quadras back up to speed.
(MacWEEK News, January 27, 1992, p.1) (c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form.
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Magnet gets new grasp on Finder
By Carolyn Said
Palo Alto, Calif. - A start-up company here is polishing up a new software package, code-named Magnet, that promises an easy way to automate previously burdensome file-management chores.
Due in April from No Hands Software, the program lets System 7 users create "intelligent agents" that automatically carry out such tasks as copying recently modified files or gathering up all database files that contain a certain phrase.
At the core of Magnet, which the company said will cost less than $150, is a powerful search engine that can find files or folders on a local Mac or across a network.
Users create a search specification, or "magnet," that can incorporate multiple criteria, including text within the file, as well as name, kind, location, date modified, date created, label and size. Magnets can move or copy matching files, or aliases to them, to user-specified locations. Searches can occur at intervals, recurrent dates or on demand.
A search for all Microsoft Word files containing the word "Macworld" took 4.6 seconds on a Mac IIci with a 120-Mbyte hard drive holding 70.2 Mbytes of files. The same search took five seconds to perform over LocalTalk and 16 seconds over AppleTalk Remote Access on a IIci connected at 9,600 bps.
Mac users who have seen demos of the program said they could think of many potential applications.
>Personal file management.
"This can make you a clean desktop person without being a fanatic about it," said Kevin Doyle, a consultant based in North Reading, Mass.
>File sharing.
"With Magnet we could have our [office-based] system call remote sites daily or weekly using AppleTalk Remote Access and copy certain specified files to the main system. That would be really handy," said Mark Heyer, whose title is "right brain" at HeyerTech Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif.-based developer of software for in-the-field medical systems.
>Selective backup.
The program could be used to copy all or selected files to another volume without running a backup application.
>Second-computer management.
Magnet can reconcile files between desktop and PowerBook Macs, No Hands said. A "smart copy" feature compares two copies of the same document on two Macs and copies the most recently modified one.
Magnet requires System 7 on the local Mac and on any node that it searches, although it can search nodes that do not contain the Magnet software. Magnet works only on networks with System 7-compatible file servers.
No Hands Software is at 200 Page Mill Road, Suite 260, Palo Alto, Calif. 94306. Phone (415) 321-7340; fax (415) 321-2209.
(MacWEEK News, January 27, 1992, p.1) (c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form.
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SuperVisor 2 allows self-scanning
By Margie Wylie
Pittsburgh - CSG Technologies Inc. this month shipped an update to its Mac management software that lets users scan their own Macs, along with a host of other improvements.
Network SuperVisor 2.0, which sells for $495 for one administrator and unlimited users, expands the software's capabilities for both users and managers:
>SuperVisor Responder 2.0, a system extension that feeds configuration information to the SuperVisor application, lets users scan their Macs' hardware and software setups to help them solve problems. Users not on the network also can use the self-scan feature to forward their configuration information to a support person running SuperVisor.
The extension ships free with SuperVisor. CSG is also offering the extension free over several on-line services.
>Topology Editor, new to this version, lets managers edit the network maps SuperVisor automatically generates. "The topology editor is an excellent feature. I haven't really seen any other product that offers the combination of not just a real-time schematic, but a mapping tool in one, which is really important," said Bill Lesieur, IS consultant responsible for Mac management at Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.'s Information Services Department in Portsmouth, N.H. Lesieur, who beta tested Version 2.0, uses Version 1.0 to track Liberty Mutual's 8,000 Macs.
>Network Control Center lets managers extend their view of the network beyond those Macs running the SuperVisor Responder system extension. The Network Control Center will show any device that registers itself on an AppleTalk network.
>Alerts warn managers by audio or visual cues when a device disappears from the network or a new one appears. It keeps a log.
Version 2.0 also lets managers scan Macs in the background without interrupting users and offers a new user interface and expanded scans that include user and volume information. Upgrades are $49.
Network SuperVisor Jr. 2.0, also shipping for $149, offers the scanning features and improvements of SuperVisor 2.0 but doesn't include mapping or a database.
CSG Technologies Inc. is at 530 William Penn Place, Suite 329, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15219. Phone (412) 471-7170; fax (412) 471-7173.
(MacWEEK Gateways, January 27, 1992, p.18) (c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form.
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Reflection 4 to support ReGIS
By Mitch Ratcliffe
Seattle - Walker Richer & Quinn Inc. recently announced Macintosh terminal-emulation support for VAX-based ReGIS graphics applications.
To ship in April for $369, Reflection 4 for the Mac will give users the ability to log onto and run VT320, 330 and 340 mainframe and minicomputer applications such as Digital Equipment Corp.'s DECgraph and DECslide engineering graphics applications. Support for text-based VT102 and VT220 server applications is also provided.
Reflection 4 allows users to display ReGIS and Sixel graphics in a window on the Mac desktop. The terminal window supports up to 16 million colors, with the capability to copy and paste graphics or text to Mac applications. Users also can customize the terminal color palette and have the ability to select the character sets used by VAX applications.
Walker Richer & Quinn will ship the Macintosh Communications Toolbox with Reflection 4. Macs will require an Ethernet connection to a VAX via either a DECnet network, the Apple LAT (Local-Area Transport) Tool or a TCP/IP network. MacTCP 1.1, Apple's TCP/IP stack, will be included.
Telnet Connection, a TCP/IP file transfer tool developed by Advanced Software Concepts of Vence, France, is included to let users download files from Unix or VAX servers.
The company ships a DOS version of the application with the same command language.
Walker Richer & Quinn Inc. is at 2815 Eastlake Ave. E., Seattle, Wash. 98102. Phone (206) 726-7368; fax (206) 322-8151.
(MacWEEK Gateways, January 27, 1992, p.18) (c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form.
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Reviews: Premiere stars in QuickTime editing
By Ric Ford
QuickTime is here, but QuickTime itself is only an architecture and an extension to the Mac operating system. To work with dynamic data, you need real applications, such as Premiere from Adobe Systems Inc.
One of the first QuickTime-based software products to arrive, Adobe Premiere is an important tool, on the level of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Premiere is a digital movie-editing program that manipulates audio, video, still images and animation to create Macintosh movies.
The program originally was developed as ReelTime by SuperMac Technology of Sunnyvale, Calif., but Adobe bought it in August 1991, renaming it Premiere. SuperMac is bundling Premiere with its VideoSpigot and VideoSpigot Pro video-capture cards during an introductory period.)
Premiere has a leading role in QuickTime movie production, but it requires a supporting cast of other hardware and software components to create and digitize the raw material with which it works. Premiere itself cannot capture either sounds or pictures, and its reliance on QuickTime means that it runs only on higher-end Macs and is constrained by the limitations of even the fastest Macs.
>Premiere process.
Although digital media provide new levels of flexibility and special constraints, the basic production process in Premiere is akin to filmmaking:
>Plan the production in advance, creating a storyboard or script.
>Create and digitize audio, video, still images and animation using other Mac products.
>Create a new Premiere file, and identify, in the Project window, the raw digital material to be used in the production.
>Edit the raw material into a movie, using the Construction window to sequence and manipulate multiple tracks of sounds and images. Intermediate results are viewed in a Preview window.
>Make the finished movie, a time-consuming but automatic operation that creates a new QuickTime movie file from the raw material, based on the editing decisions specified in the Construction window.
Once a QuickTime file has been generated, it generally will be used for presentation or distributed for playback on other QuickTime-capable computers. Premiere also can print movies to videotape for playback on VCRs, but this requires special audio and video output hardware, and no standard Mac is capable of producing QuickTime output at the quality level of standard videotapes.
Audio output is limited to monophonic, 22-kHz sound. Video quality is dependent on the power of the Mac and its video hardware; typically, you will be limited to postage stamp-size images running at about a quarter of the speed of television or film.
>Construction zone.
Premiere accepts most standard Mac media types as input, including PICT and Photoshop graphics files - including JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)-compressed PICTs - and PICS animation files. Several audio file types also may be used as source material: snd resources, Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) and Sound Edit files. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files are not currently supported by QuickTime.
QuickTime movie files, too, are raw material for Premiere, as well as Premiere's final product. Audio and visual tracks of an existing QuickTime movie may be manipulated separately during editing.
When source material is added to a Premiere project, the program captures information about the material, including thumbnail images, but the actual data is not copied to the Premiere file. Premiere saves only reference pointers, and the original material must be available while the Premiere project is in progress.
Once the original material has been selected, the actual editing takes place in a multi-track Construction window.
The window can be set to various levels of magnification, allowing you to see a variable number of clips at one time, from a single frame (one-thirtieth of a second) per inch to two minutes per inch.
Three tracks of audio and two image tracks are available, as well as a track for controlling special effects and an additional, superimposed video track.
Graphics, sounds and moving images dragged from the Project window into the tracks are easily trimmed and sequenced with the mouse. The window automatically scrolls as you drag left or right, and a special bar at the top lets you define a work area for previewing and other operations.
Individual audio and video clips can be cut and rearranged with a razor-blade cursor that appears when you hold down the Control key.
If you double-click a clip, it opens into a larger window with a complete set of controls for moving forward and backward, quickly or slowly. You can mark "in" and "out" points for the clip, which mark the start and end of a clip, and quickly define up to 10 place markers to note specific frames. A Goto function instantly moves to a marked frame.
The Construction window and the clip windows are all indexed by standard timecode numbers for cross-reference, and you can move to a location in a clip window by typing in its timecode.
>Mixing, transitions and filters.
One of Premiere's strongest features is its graphics control over levels for audio and video mixing. Each of the three audio tracks and the Superimpose track have a "subtrack," in which you can drag lines up and down to adjust levels over time. This system provides great flexibility with little effort.
Another important feature is the Special Effects track, into which you can drag various icons that control transitions between the A and B video tracks.
The transitions range from a very useful dissolve to a PICT Mask, which lets you create overlays on any part of one image with the other, in any shape. The transitions can go from A to B or vice versa, and some effects have additional controls.
The Superimpose track also is very flexible, offering chromakeying, optional drop shadows and anti-aliased edges, and even support for alpha channels in still images to control transparency. A Garbage Matte lets you crop the superimposed image so that it overlays only part of the main image.
Filters are effects that can be applied to an entire clip at one time. There are two audio filters - delay and backwards - and a variety of video filters, for adjusting color, contrast and brightness and for creating special effects. Premiere can apply Photoshop filters to images, in addition to its built-in filters and Aldus' new Gallery Effects filters.
Output and distribution. We expect Premiere to be used mainly for the creation of QuickTime movies that will be played on the Macintosh itself. Premiere's Print to Video function has little to do with video per se, but it does create a clean presentation of a QuickTime movie that can be videotaped, provided the appropriate video and audio output hardware is available.
Print to Video simply blanks the screen for a few seconds, then plays a QuickTime movie on a black background with no windows or controls cluttering the screen. It works only on a QuickTime movie file, so Premiere projects must be run through the slow Make Movie step before being presented.
The file created by Make Movie is a standard QuickTime movie, which can be viewed by Apple's Simple Player and other QuickTime applications.
Editing of analog video is currently outside the scope of Premiere, but it may be included in the future as Apple adds machine-control features to QuickTime.
>Compatibility and support.
Premiere requires a minimum of 4 Mbytes of RAM for itself, but more memory is recommended. We were unable to make a simple slide show with medium-size images using the standard memory allocation.
Digital video editing also requires a high-capacity hard drive - the faster the better. Premiere will run on System 6.0.7 with 32-bit-color QuickDraw 1.2 or later, but it will not run without QuickTime 1.0. Since QuickTime requires a 68020 processor or better and at least four bits of screen depth, Premiere is out of the question for the Mac Classic, Plus, Portable and PowerBooks.
Adobe warrants Premiere to perform substantially in accordance with its documentation for a period of 90 days from delivery.
The manual is concise and professional, and a handy quick-reference card also is included. Adobe provides technical support by telephone (not toll-free), fax and on-line through CompuServe.
We encountered no bugs during our testing.
>Conclusions.
Premiere is a strong, well-focused product with the potential to grow as QuickTime grows. It does not create or capture sounds and images or control analog video hardware, but the program is a complete and intuitive tool for editing digital raw material into QuickTime movies.
The $495 list price for Premiere is not cheap, but it is reasonable for an application at this level of quality and performance. SuperMac Technology's $95 VideoSpigot-Premiere bundle, available during the first quarter of this year, is a very attractive packages. Adobe also plans to make Premiere available to owners of Adobe Photoshop at $199.
SCORE CARD
Overall value Very good
Performance Good
Features Good
Ease of use Excellent
Documentation/support Very good
List price $495
ON BALANCE
Adobe Premiere is a complete and intuitive editing application for creating QuickTime movies. It imports still images, animations, sounds and QuickTime videos created by other applications, but it does not digitize analog material or control tape decks. Premiere needs at least a 68020 processor, 32-bit-color QuickDraw and lots of memory. Currently, any standard Mac platform is too limited in processing power to work with full-motion, full-size video, but hardware compressors and decompressors may change that before long. As QuickTime grows, Premiere should grow, too.
Adobe Systems Inc. is at 1585 Charleston Road, P.O. Box 7900, Mountain View, Calif. 94039-7900. Phone (415) 961-4400 or (800) 833-6687; fax (415) 961-0612.
(MacWEEK Reviews, January 27, 1992, p.39) (c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form.
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Mac the Knife: One-size-fits-all LC PDS slot
Some people think history is pretty dull stuff. But those folks have it all wrong. In reality, history is just the common recollection of the life we're living as we live it. All of which leads to the question of how we'll remember this particular phase of our existence. First, of course, this winter will be remembered as the time political figures of remarkable stature stalked the frozen landscape of New Hampshire in search of the people's validation.
It also might be remembered as the winter there was a bit of confusion about the specifics of Apple's plans for the new 68030 LCs. Despite what you may have heard (or actually seen), Apple's plan for the new LC is to include a floating-point unit slot. In the same vein, the previously reported 120-pin 68030 processor direct slot will be backward-compatible with the crop of 96-pin '020 PDS cards.
As anyone who has tried it will wearily tell you, 2 Mbytes of RAM is no way to run System 7. In apparent recognition of this fact, the new LCs should ship with 4 Mbytes of RAM soldered onto the logic board. This is a good indication that Apple has finally seen the light and will soon abandon low RAM configurations all together.
>What recession?
The next time some administration officials are casting about for an example of how well things are going in general, they could do a whole lot worse than point to SuperMac Technology's recent successes in the multimedia product arena. Sources have told the Knife that sales of the VideoSpigot are off to an incredibly fast start. As the story goes, SuperMac moved $1 million worth, which was the entire inventory at the time, on the first day they went on sale. All of this is also good news for Apple, as it demonstrated the validity (at the right price) of its emphasis on multimedia for the past couple of years. This can even be good news for Chrysler once company executives figure out a way to convince the public that the LeBaron is a multimedia productivity tool.
SuperMac is betting that it can duplicate that kind of sales success sometime next year. The Knife has learned that the company has recently hired some top-drawer talent to head up the development of a real-time image-manipulation product. Professional video and post-production types are expected to see the Mac with new eyes once exposed to the power of the pricey Quantel Paintbox (with its dedicated chip for each editing function) on a Mac NuBus card at one-tenth the price of current implementations.
In more immediate SuperMac news, those of you getting a little bored waiting for the company to deliver on the promised VideoSpigot with sound will be pleased to learn that a deal has been struck with MacroMind-Paracomp to offer a VideoSpigot-SoundRecorder bundle. And pulling the last item out of his once bulging SuperMac bag, the Knife reports that La Cie has agreed to assume customer support responsibilities for those many thousands of discontinued SuperMac hard drives that are still in use.
>It takes Taligent.
Although a recent spate of speculative stories might lead you to think otherwise, things are moving apace at both Taligent and Kaleida, where the heads of engineering (both Apple alumni) already have their teams busily cranking codes. Not surprisingly, both Apple and IBM have their own candidates to head each of the joint ventures. But it appears that blue-suits from IBM are in line at least one and probably both CEO slots. The engineers are hoping these little matters are settled soon so they can get out of their old Apple offices and into their new digs.
>Talk is cheap.
After three years or so it's hard to keep up interest in almost anything, even when it's as inherently exciting as The Lawsuit. Apple's attorneys, however, have shown a lot of interest in getting testimony from developers with fingers in both pies. Needless to say, these developers are a bit reluctant to offend either Apple or Microsoft.
On the other hand, maybe Bill and John can work it out themselves. Spies have sighted Gates at Sculley's ranch down on the Peninsula. So who knows?
You can call him Mac and you can call him the Knife, but if you've got an insider tip and want a MacWEEK mug you gotta call him at (415) 243-3500, fax (415) 243-3650, MCI (MactheKnife), AppleLink (MacWEEK) and CompuServe/ZiffNet/Zmac.
(MacWEEK, Mac the Knife, January 27, 1992, p. 94) (c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form.
