Homeworld's Profile

Re: "Finally, before the iPhone there was no such thing as a touch-screen phone or an application store where anyone could distribute an application." You can't seriously mean that. The Palm Treo 650 came out how many years before the iPhone? Touchscreen UI, downloadable applications from Palm and various 3rd-party sites... Not saying the iPhone isn't revolutionary in its near-perfection of the mobile phone arts, but the above statement is flat-out wrong.

Nice to see that someone else recalls this arguably underhanded and unethical little switcheroo Apple pulled. However, not all Mac Clone makers were immediately affected. Umax successfully negotiated a Mac OS 8 license, and shipped machines for more than a year with Mac OS 8.0 before ending production and new sales in the fall of '98. The last new Umax machine, the SuperMac J710, was actually to ship with Mac OS 8 in the spring of '98, but was killed by a different issue: although Umax could ship Mac OS 8 with previously licensed and certified models (all PPC603x- and 604x-based), Apple would not certify any new (G3-based) hardware from any clone maker. The J710 died, and the <50 units produced went home with Umax employees, their friends, and family. For a while, Umax got around the G3 cut-off by literally strapping Newer Tech G3 upgrade cards to the outside of S900 boxes, and later developed their own G3 upgrades in-house which were intended to ship in the box. So as not to raise Apple's ire, the J710 was shown at Macworld SF '98 running on a 250MHz 604e, though Umax's own 250MHz G3 card was already good to go. (Questions at the show about which processor the J710 would actually ship with were gracelessly evaded.) http://home.earthlink.net/~supermac_insider/