Posted Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Exclusive! New Startup Chime for Macintel Computers Revealed

A source deep within Apple, someone I will call Deep Rosetta, has sent me a copy of what she claims will be the startup sound of the new generation of Intel-based Macs.

Download it now (112K AAC file).

I'm kidding, of course. I made that little ditty myself using Apple's Soundtrack Pro software. Ah, this is going to be fun.

A couple of correspondents thought my remarks of yesterday were a bit flippant. I'm offended. I thought they were completely flippant.

It's just another transition, my friends. I've seen many of them since late 1983, when I started working with this platform. I remember the hew and cry that went up when developers had to adapt their software to run under MultiFinder.

There will be some transition pains. There will be technical adventures. There will be software upgrades. And there will be rewards, such as fast laptop Macs that don't feel like hotplates on your thighs.

Not that that's the worst feeling in the world.

Flippant? You bet. I'm a consumer advocate and a teacher, Jim, not a pundit. My respect for pundits is somewhere down around my respect for know-it-all gasbags. Steve Jobs rescued this platform from the depths of boring beige boxes that had indecipherable model names and ran a creaky, outmoded operating system. If he says we need to switch processor architectures to keep things interesting, then lead me to the lemming line.

More of this on the Radio Tonight
I'll be talking (and talking and talking) about Apple's move to Intel processors tonight on Point & Click Radio, the weekly radio show that I co-host here in the wilds of Mendocino County. Listen in at 7:00 pm Pacific time, if you like, and call in with any opinions you might have on the matter. Our toll-free number (listed on the Web site) works throughout the US.