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Apple & The G4 Order Truth
ferret wrote to us with the final
word from high at Apple about what's up with the G4 Orders. No, they are not cancelled. Yes, there's been a confusion. 400 and 450 Mhz machines will ship as originally promised, but the 500 Mhz machine will not ship until next year. This means that customer who ordered a 500 Mhz will be offered a 450 Mhz machine for now.
After all the fuss (with virtually no official word from Apple, just rumors), Apple ends up doing even more than anybody hoped, and is honoring wholesale orders too - not just Apple Store orders. I guess we need to stop picking on them for a while.
When you look at it, Apple did what they cood with a bad processor availability situation, and used this as leverage with their chip vendors to resolve a fork in the architecture. Remember, Apple was getting G4 processors directly from Motorola only - IBM hadn't been planning to build AltiVec enabled chips. IBM was doing fine with copper-based G3 processors and the embedded stuff. Now IBM is on the AltiVec bandwagon, Apple will get a more stable supply, and six months from now nobody will remember the fab problems that triggered this in the first place.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
It's true that a lot of unfounded information gets circulated on the net. Even though we've mostly learned to disregard email concerning Little-Emily-With-Cancer's dying wishes, lots of us are still learning that we need to apply an extra level of scrutiny to even the mail services online. I think matters will sort out quite a bit as time goes by. Serious news media tend to filter out and become known for their reliability, even as the most atrocious gossip-mongers ooze their way to the lower end of the spectrum. While the net is still young, we readers will have to be alert. If we can't do that, we'll find ourselves in more situations like this business with Apple. There, the herd stampeded because very few stopped to consider the truth of the message. If Slashdot is going take responsibility for trying to avert such events, it will require a collective effort on the part of the readers to examine the sources of information we consume.
evano
um... This article is somewhat inaccurate.
... will honor all orders for its Power Macintosh G4 computers placed before... October 13, at the originally quoted prices, including those placed with the Company's resellers which were accompanied by a purchase order, or a cash or credit card deposit."
"Apple
Apple is ONLY honoring orders that were made via the AppleStore. If you ordered your G4 through a catalog reseller, or CompUSA, or anyone else in the channel (prepaid or not!), well, you're pretty much out of luck. Considering how Apple has flip-flopped over this a few times in the last 48 buisness hours, I can see where the Media was also confused (not that they usually have it right; a post a couple blocks up reviews that well.)
I guess working here at Apple gives me a different perspective on alot of these issues; I'm far from an Apple-Mac bigot (prior to working here I unfortunately was) and if you ever read profiles, you can see that Apple isn't the only OS that I use (each tool has a different job.) But considering the chip supply problems that Motorola was having (less then 24% yield on their fabs) and the demand for the AGP based G4, I don't really see what else Apple could have done. At least we're learning for our mistakes and going back to the dual-vendor approach (IBM and Motorola) and _trying_ to fix what's gone wrong. Some people look at it like "the top end DVD-RAM model is finally available, yeah!" and I guess that's the glass-is-half-full way to look at it. I just shrug my shoulders and realize that there wasn't much of a choice either way.
In