Macworld Expose

When IDG announced that their east coast Macworld Expo 2004 would be hosted in Boston instead of New York City, Apple were not at all pleased.  First they threatened to withdraw from Macworld Boston 2004.  Then, in a surprising all-or-nothing move, Apple also announced that they might even pull out of Macworld Expo NY 2003!  What reason could Steve Jobs—who was believed to be the decision-maker in this power play—have for such rash behavior? Perhaps he wanted to help rebuild New York City's struggling economy with a huge money-making event?  Or maybe he wanted to be close to Wall Street and investors, (the real reason Apple even attends Macworld)?  Or maybe he just doesn't like that eerie Beantown accent?  Either way, Macworld NYC will never be the same.  What a mess a strange vernacular can Create!

Idiot's Guise

Whatever the topic, you can be sure there is an Idiot's Guide or for Dummies book to match.   Bob LeVitus and his popular Mac OS X for Dummies will be good reading for the Mac newbie, but what about the Antichrist and the Megalomaniac?  The Jerk and the Putz?  Why cater only to the mentally deficient, when there is clearly a larger market in ethical deficiency.

Fallout at the Gap

Most people know Steve Jobs for his role as CEO of both Apple and Pixar.  But few people realize that Jobs was also a member of the Gap board, until October 3, 2002, when he resigned from the clothing company board.  Who knows what prompted Jobs to Fall Into The Gap in the first place?  Maybe it was the endless supply of jeans for his keynote addresses.

AppleCheryl

On September 18, 2002, Cheryl Vedoe, Vice President of Education Products and Marketing at Apple, announced that she was leaving to become CEO at Apex Learning.  This kinda' left Apple in a pinch during difficult times.  I think she could have enabled AppleShare and worked at both places.  If Jobs can juggle Apple and Pixar, the same should go for his VPs!

The SoHo Case

On August 18, 2002, customers arriving at the new Apple Soho Store in Manhattan—home of the Million Dollar Glass Staircase, special ordered by Steve Jobs for his largest retail outfit to date—were regretfully turned away as sad Mac Geniuses handed out Jaguar promotional flyers.  According to witnesses, several police were in the store, and some portions of the floor were closed off by a police line.  Details surrounding the event are vague, and Apple SoHo staff have been ordered silent about the ordeal, but the general concensus is that the store was robbed.  No one knows what was taken, except for the store managers.  I would have gone and rubbernecked myself, but it isn't nice to stop and stair.

Jaguar in a Pink Cadillac

Baby, if you want to experience the benefits of Jaguar , you've got to pay! $129 for Mac OS X 10.2, $29.99 for QuickTime Pro 6, $19.99 for QuickTime 6 MPEG-2 Playback, and $99 per year for .mac services. By the time you're through, you won't have much money left, but you'll have the security of a world class, fur coat clad, Pimp of the Stable, Jaguar. "Where's my money, bitch?"

Junk Filter

When Steve Jobs attempted to demonstrate how the new Mac OS X 10.2 Mail app's Junk Mail Filter could automatically move spam to the trash, the audience waited patiently as the increasingly aggravated CEO struggled with menu options and preferences before giving up.  "It will work when 10.2 ships", Jobs assured us.  Which is more than we can say for the poor sap who prepared the demo.

.avie

Macworld NY 2002 Keynote Address attendees were enthusiastic about most of Jobs's announcements. QuickTime 6, iTunes, Jaguar, Junk Mail Filter, and many more products elicited positive response from the audience.  But when Jobs got around to announcing the discontinuation of free iTools, to be replaced with the $100/year .mac service, audience participation dragged to a halt.  Amidst the silence, one could hear clapping from a joyful Avie Tevanian, head of Apple’s Software Engineering group and former VP of Engineering at NeXT.  He was either excited about the products or his bonus.  Or the fact that he gets a free .mac account anyway.

.smac

I suppose Steve Jobs was caught between a rock and a hard place when it came time for him to announce that iTools , now called .mac, would no longer be a free service.  What better way to drop the bomb than to remind everyone how much the competition sucks!  With a slight of tongue, Jobs explained that Yahoo! had started charging for POP e-mail accounts, and that all the other Internet disk services have gone out of business.  To rev us up even more, Jobs mentioned how Microsoft's .NET service is all .wet.  But was it enough to evoke a positive response from the audience?  Well, let's just say I heard more crickets than usual.

17"

Several owners of the 15" flat panel iMac have reported that their displays have become loose and tilt slightly to one side.  Will a 17" flat panel iMac display eventually tilt like a pinball machine?  Stop by the new Apple Store in SoHo, NYC every week with a ruler and level, and report back to this forum.

Leer Jet

Steve Jobs may only get a salary of $1 per year, but his stock options and bonuses more than make up for his less-than-minimum wages.   To show their appreciation for Jobs bringing the company back to life, Apple gave Steve a $90M Gulfstream V private jet!  The only thing it was missing was that giant novelty bow on the top of all the expensive gift cars in the Lexus commercials.  Saturday Night Live did a spoof of the commercial, in which they were selling the giant bows to add the finishing touches to the gift cars.  So this cartoon is a spoof of a goof of a poof on a roof.  Moof.

Résumé

Apple's iTools offers Mac users free disk space, e-mail, and a personal web site to share with the world.  You can use it to post a photo album, share files, and even showcase your résumé.  Even Steve Jobs has taken advantage of this free service.  His impressive résumé summarizes Jobs's entrepreneurial history, including his fledgling startup company, NeXT Software Inc.  Maybe that bastard redheaded stepchild of a company is marring his otherwise enviable reputation.  Why else would he have not been offered a new job yet?

Chiat Daze

As spoken by Richard Dreyfuss in Apple's Think Different ad campaign: 

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or villify them...about the only thing you can't do is ignore them, because they change things, they push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." 

What's that Albert Einstein and Bob Dylan are smoking? Probably something different. 

In memory of Jay Chiat, cofounder of Apple's longtime ad agency, Chiat/Day, who passed away on April 23, 2002

Menagerie

Apple has been incorporating music and videos by the band Barenaked Ladies since their music video The Old Apartment from their album Born On A Pirate Ship was included as a QuickTime sample on the Mac OS 8 System Install CD.  BNL have also contributed to the included playlist bundled with iTunes, and have even appeared in Apple's iTunes television commercial Rip.Mix.Burn.  Just how Apple has managed to wrangle so many songs from BNL remains a mystery, but I'm guessing they are favorites from Steve Jobs's personal collection.

Rejects, Part 2

 

Apple may have abandoned their fun color schemes, and the CRT iMac all together.  But we at Macboy have managed to uncover some more of the unique iMac themes that never made it to market.  For some reason Lime prevailed as the zestiest citrus flavor—apparently no one wanted a Lemon for a computer.  And people preferred their pure Snow iMacs before Blue Dalmations—obviously a cuddlier breed than the proposed Pitbull—marked their territory in iMac history.  And while Beige may no longer be a color in the spectrum of Apple's rainbow, it will always be in our hearts.

Conflict

Macboy Fan strikes again!  I couldn't have said it better myself, so read the analogy below ... 

(Extension) Conflicts! Where is Conflict Catcher when you need it?  

Maybe if they upgraded to Mac OS X, they could do away with all kinds of (extension) conflicts for good. It should also prevent random (system) bombs from appearing and doing damage.  

If they wanted to stay with Mac OS 9, I would suggest deleting the (hard disk) partitions and doing a clean (system) install.  Getting a package like Rewind is useful too, just in case you need to quickly uninstall a piece of software that just caused another conflict.  

Seriously I hope they do something soon.  I am ashamed to call myself a member of the human race at the moment.  The same rules that apply with Macs apply with people.  If you have conflicts everything crashes and bombs. But when you resolve those conflicts, you have harmony, the most stable Mac and the greatest place to live on the planet.  

Who doesn't want that?

Fat Panel iMac

At Macworld Expo Tokyo 2002, Apple announced that, for the first time, they would be raising the price of their new iMac by $100.  Usually the price of computers drops over time, but due to increased manufacturing costs, Apple was left with few choices ...

Identity Crisis

What Macboy Fan said ... 

The Power Mac 4400 (aka Performa 4400 and Power Mac 7220 in some international markets) was one of Apple's attempts at creating a cheaper computer to attact the price focused customer.  

Although they had all the usual ports and connections, you couldn't help but notice that something was different about this computer.  The floppy disk drive was on the left hand side (the only time this has ever been done), and it had a very basic metal enclosure.  

If you hadn't seen the Apple logo on the front you could almost be forgiven for thinking you were looking at a wintel box.  Well you would have been close, they were all built for Apple by Acer Computer in Tawian.  The internal and external design was very close to an Acer's desktop at that time.    

The front bezel was the only thing that looked designed in Cupertino. 

No wonder this poor Mac is confused!

iWalk

For the first time in eighteen years, Steve Jobs rescheduled his Keynote Address one day earlier at MacWorld San Francisco 2002.  While the last-minute change of date inconvenienced hundreds of attendees, Jobs promised that his announcement would make it worth the trouble.  Many people speculated that Apple would be announcing a new PDA, rumored to be named iWalk.  In reality, the big news turned out merely to be a funny looking iMac.

Cross Platform

Typical situation: A large corporation has 10,000 PCs for accounting, and only ten Macs in the graphics department.  Does this company hire an IT staff who can support both PC and Mac? Of course not! They'd rather have a PC tech break the Macs during a session of ignorant troubleshooting. 

That's when you should call Macboy.

Problems Cubed

When Apple released the new G4 Cube, many people complained that the clear lucite enclosure had cracks along the edges.  To make matters worse, customers reported that their beloved Cubes were randomly going into sleep mode .  Apple quickly resolved the problem by discontinuing the Cube.

Short Circuit

On February 8, 2002, Apple severed their relationship with Circuit City, notifying them with a corporate memo stating they would be pulling all merchandise and display equipment.  Perhaps this is Apple's way of punishing Circuit City for confusing the DVD standard with a proprietary DVD format called Divx, which died in 1999. 

First Sears, now Circuit City ... is the writing on the wall for reseller CompUSA?  Discuss below!

Vis-a-vi

With Apple's new Mac OS X, which is based on the Unix flavor FreeBSD, it's easy to run terminal applications like vi.  But only a true Mac hacker could get Mac OS X to run on Apple's short-lived legacy Macintosh IIvi!   alt.hacintosh (now called alt.hackintosh) used to be a forum for creative Mac hackers, but now just caters to serial number swappers.

New iMac Plant

Steve Jobs told head designer, Jonathan Ive, that he wanted the new iMac to "look like a sunflower."  Considering Jobs's college studies in pharmacopoeial flora, we're surprised that the plant he chose was not something more inspiring. 

Add your comment below—we'ed love to hear from you!

Little Buddy

Sit right back and you'll hear a tale—a tale of a mysterious Apple server at littlebuddy.apple.com!  In November 2000, several people noticed that their Macs were connecting to the elusive server, but no one knew why.  Some speculated that the IP address was used for data mining, allowing Apple to surreptitiously collect personal information from unsuspecting customers.  Others wondered if the legend of Gilligan's Island was true, and if the motley crew of castaways had somehow constructed a server from coconuts and sticks.  The truth was much less interesting:   Apple's Setup Assistant used the server to transmit registration information.

Big News

Well, I'm glad to say that Steve Jobs had much more interesting announcements than a new goatee for his Macworld San Francisco 2002 keynote speech.  In fact, a clean-shaven Jobs made a bevy of announcements, including a brand new flat panel LCD iMac, iPhoto, a more robust iBook, and much more.  Mr. Jobs made no promise or mention of a GHz range G4 processor, though, to avoid being labeled a bald-faced liar.