We have lots of interesting comments from readers in this issue, including more on the mean time between failures for hard drives, the new PowerBooks, Symantec’s purchasing history, and various Apple products. Mark Anbinder reports on Apple’s new 17" monitor and the continuance of Apple’s Vintage hardware program, and Tim Levy tells us about the massive database for tracking Macintosh software updates that he’s created for TidBITS readers.
New PowerBook Comments -- In regard to the upcoming release of new PowerBooks mentioned in TidBITS #222, Dave Hirsh warns: "The 9.5" color active matrix screens that the 540 will use are probably going to suffer the same supply problems that IBM has with the ThinkPad 750Cs
Ron Davis of Datawatch writes in response to our query about the status of 911 Utilities:
Datawatch's 911 Utilities product is only available in the SuperSet utilities package
Buy, Don't Build -- An ex-Symantec employee writes to tell us about how many programs Symantec has developed as opposed to acquiring:
As a matter of fact, it's pretty easy to figure out
Apple reports that their 14-Mar-94 price lists stated incorrectly that the Power Macintosh 6100/60 logic board upgrade (item M2343LL/A) includes 2 MB of VRAM, or video memory
The QuickTake 100 digital camera, or more precisely, the software bundled with it, is not yet compatible with Power Macintoshes. Apple plans to offer a "QuickTake for Power Macintosh Install Disk," which will work in conjunction with the two disks already provided
Apple's 15" Portrait Display is the last of the company's original line of external Macintosh monitors, first introduced in 1987, to be removed from the product family
Brian Hall writes about General Magic's Magic Cap:
A product using Magic Cap has been shown - the Motorola Envoy. Motorola had a large island booth at Mobile '94 recently, and they had seven or eight third-party developers showing off applications
Director of Technical Services, Baka Industries Inc.
Apple recently introduced its new Multiple Scan 17 Display, a 17" color Trinitron monitor expected to be available worldwide this month
Apple's warehouses have long been filled to the rafters with potentially useful, but unwanted, obsolete equipment. This practice kept good hardware out of the hands of potential purchasers and proved to be a tremendous waste of expensive storage space
The discussion that arose following our offhand question about how those mean time between failure (MTBF) numbers are arrived at continues to spawn interesting comments
From time to time Apple issues updates to its Macintosh system software. These updates are either fixes to bugs that have been discovered or versions that introduce some new capability