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Playing the Slots (5/29/98)
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Soon, six-PCI-slot Mac systems may be harder to find than a permanent Apple CEO. Mac users (such as digital video producers) who need more PCI slots than the three present in Apple's current G3 systems have turned to the few remaining clonemakers such as Umax and Mactell, who still sell six-slot Tsunami motherboard systems, typically with G3 upgrade cards installed. Unfortunately for them, Mac cloning v.1.0 is in its last death throes, according to a MacWEEK article, so that avenue will be gone by the end of the year.
As for an Apple-branded six-slot system to take the place of the 9600, it doesn't sound like Apple's really planning anything like that, now that the Gossamer II motherboard project is dead. Instead, Apple will rely on the third-party companies who make PCI expansion chassis to cater to the relatively small market that needs that many slots. That sounds like a reasonable stance to adopt, given that Apple's trying to reduce the number of motherboards it produces, and more slots means higher cost for the vast majority of people who would be paying for slots they'll never use.
Unfortunately, that doesn't address the concerns of the other audience fond of the Tsunami motherboard-- those people who need a ton of RAM. The Tsunami could take up to a full gigabyte of RAM, which only sounds excessive if you don't happen to work with huge prepress graphics files that you'd like to manipulate completely in RAM instead of falling back on a scratch disk. Hopefully Apple's upcoming high-end systems will take more RAM than the current G3's, which max out at something like 768MB, and only then if you use expensive DIMMs larger than Apple recommends.
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SceneLink (749)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/29/98 episode: May 29, 1998: The giant icons that graced the park outside Apple's Cupertino campus have been deleted; are they simply in need of repair, or is the explanation much more sinister? Meanwhile, Intel's upcoming Merced processor sees another delay, and the final death of the clones threatens to leave a six-slot void in the Mac market...
Other scenes from that episode: 747: Missing CRSR Resource (5/29/98) Yet another symbol of Apple's past is gone. This time, it's the famous "icon garden" that's gotten the axe. For the uninitiated, the public park outside Apple's headquarters in Cupertino includes huge sculptures of famous cursor icons, such as the arrow, the pencil, and the dogcow-- at least, it did until a few days ago... 748: Waiting for Merced (5/29/98) Merced, Merced, Merced-- that's all we ever freaking hear about from those who try to wave off the PowerPC's large (and growing) performance lead over Intel's processor offerings. Merced, as you probably have not been able to avoid hearing, is the next-generation 64-bit chip that Intel has been working on (together with Hewlett Packard) for several years now...
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