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Wait and Don't Panic

Dirk Pilat - 2001.07.25

Hi everybody!

Sorry for not coming back to you earlier, but the last weeks have been a bit hectic with postgraduate exams and too many on-calls and such. But here I am, rejuvenated after a day off and completely and utterly baffled after that odd anticlimax that was his insanely great Steveness' Expo keynote. There I was, sitting in my little cottage overlooking the Loch, my two 64k ISDN channels desperately trying keep up with the transmission of his Jobsiness trying to switch on a digital camera (brilliant line: "Hey I need help: It's technical").

Just like everybody else in the known Mac universe I was hoping for that revolutionary revamp of the Power Mac G4 aging iMacs and what happened: nothing. Well, the well known G4s now look silver, but everybody who had hoped for an processor speed increase above that psychological oh-so-important gigahertz level (just to shut up the grinning Wintel users) was bitterly disappointed.

All we know now after this presentation is that OS X slowly but surely works as well as it should, that DVD recognition still takes too long (brilliant: Jobs sitting in front of his Monitor and desperately waiting for that window to pop up), and that Steve Jobs can't switch on a digital camera (or was it a OS X flaw?). Oh yes, and Adobe and Apple are still friends. Allegedly.

No wonder that people got angry. I certainly thought that I wasted 90 minutes of my time, and I was just sitting comfortably with a coffee in front of my ancient iMac, not stuck in a stuffy conference hall, shelling out bucks to see this sorry state of affairs.

Sure enough, the stock market reacted just as frustrated as the Mac-parish, and Apple's stocks fell again. Sigh.

So, what are we going to do? Well, there's always waiting. Wait and don't panic. The economic signs are pretty good: The CFO of Apple is doing good work in a tough market in a electronic recession. The new retail strategy of dedicated Appleshops will help to broaden the mass iBook appeal. I am sure that the iMac line will be revamped for Christmas, so all the kids (and big ones, like me) will want the shiny new iMac that would just fit brilliantly with the school's new silver iBook. So, no worries there.

Nevertheless I'll just wait a little bit longer before I buy OS X (my Samsung laser printer is still not supported), and my shiny new iBook that will hopefully pop through my letterbox really soon (hey, it's supposed to be pretty slim) will continue running OS 9.1 for the time being. Amid all these optimistic soundings, the only thing that is left for me to do is invite you all to the biggest and best European Hacker Conference, HAL 2001 in Twente, The Netherlands, where I will be holding a talk on the use and misuse of medical information on the Internet. With some happy cheers from Scotland, this is Dirk

Signing out.

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