All Systems Go For Mac's Long-awaited Notebook Laptop
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday February 4, 1991
IT'S now official. There will be a notebook-sized Macintosh laptop, and it is scheduled for release before the end of this year.
Apple Computer's chairman, John Sculley, and its chief operating officer, Mike Spindler, announced this at a press conference in California, confirming reports that these pages have been publishing since last October.
Whew. That's one story we got right. One that we got slightly wrong was to the effect that an upgraded version of the Macintosh Portable would be released at the recent Macworld Expo in San Francisco.
Alas, it wasn't, even though the story had appeared soundly based: the upgraded Portable was listed in the official Macworld Expo list of new product announcements.
The Apple Orchard's face isn't the only red one on this, believe us. The word at San Francisco was that the Portable upgrade project had been temporarily slipped to the back burner due to "technical and manufacturing problems".
One account in the US trade press blamed the delay on delivery problems with "pseudo-static" RAM, whatever that might be.
The project is now said to be back on the front burner, and the upgraded Portable may be released in March, along with Apple's new low-cost bubble-jet printer, based on Canon's best-selling BJ10E.
But don't bet on it.
The upgrade's major feature is said to be a backlit screen. The current Portable's screen is one of the best for clarity and fast response in good light, but can be hard to read in dim conditions - in a Boeing 747 cabin, for instance.
The new screen should help Mac Portable sales, but won't answer the more serious objection to the Portable: it's just too big and too weighty in comparison to the featherweight notebook computers now flooding on to the IBM-compatible market.
As John Sculley said at the press conference: "Notebook computers are clearly what the market is waiting for. We are designing and building notebook computers ourselves and working with another company to help us."
Mr Sculley did not elaborate further publicly, but it's common knowledge that the other company involved is Sony. While Sony is not especially known for its laptop computers - Sharp has a far better record among Japanese makers and might have appeared a wiser choice of partners - it has a long-standing relationship with Apple.
It was responsible for the Mac's floppy disk drive, and it also supplies Apple with some of its large screens and CD-Rom drives, among other items.
Meanwhile, the US trade tabloid Mac Week, quoting "sources close to the company", has published details of three of the notebook models said to be scheduled for release later this year.
The most powerful will be built around the Motorola 68030 chip.
It will have a backlit activematrix screen, a single floppy disk drive and an optional 40-megabyte hard disk. It should weigh abount 3kg and the target price is $US4,800.
If that is right, Australians may be able to buy the 68030 for about$A7,000-$7,500 - not exactly cheap, but well below the current price of comparable-performance DOS machines from companies like Compaq and Toshiba.
It would also undercut the present price of the Mac Portable in Australia: $A7,995.
A cheaper notebook model is also planned, powered by the 68020 processor used in the Macintosh LC desktop model.
It will have a backlit super-twist screen: cheaper than the active-matrix model, but with a slower screen-refresh rate. No price has been named.
Cheapest and smallest of the trio will be a 16-megaHertz 68000 model, weighing 2.5kg. This is the model reportedly being developed by Sony, which will manufacture it at a plant near Tokyo until Apple is able to take over the job.
The Sony Mac will have 2Mb of random access memory, an inbuilt modem and a 40Mb hard disk drive, but no floppy drive. Target price: $US2,500 in the US -a good guess for Australia may be a smidgin under $A4,000.
Looking further ahead, Apple is said to be working on even smaller models for possible delivery in 1992.
One model, dubbed the Macintosh Companion, is expected to weigh about 1.6kg. It is expected to have a finger- and pen-sensitive touch pad and a digital signal processor.
In tough economic times, we all have to make sacrifices.
At the same press conference, Mr Sculley announced that he had ordered himself a pay cut - of some $A769,000 a year.
"I got tired of people talking about fat cats at Apple," he said.
This particular cat still won't be quite down to skin and bones. Documents sent to Apple shareholders recently put Mr Sculley's cash compensation for fiscal 1990 at the equivalent of $A2.8 million.
Apple Computer's fierce protection of its proprietary Macintosh technology, embedded on read-only-memory (Rom) chips, has so far prevented the emergence of any legal Mac clones.
A number of Asian-based would-be clonemakers are licking their wounds after skirmishing with Apple's legal department.
But there never seems to be any shortage of triers.
The latest is NuTek Computers Inc, funded by US and Taiwanese venture capital, which claims to have developed technology that would allow other manufacturers to create Mac-compatible computers without violating Apple patents and copyrights.
It claims to have written its own Rom chips and software which would enable computers to run most Mac programs and use Mac peripherals, like hard drives, modems and printers.
NuTek officials said the company had taken scrupulous precautions to protect itself legally and was financially prepared to withstand a legal battle.
Scrupulous precautions or no scrupulous precautions, you can safely bet that a mighty legal stoush would follow the marketing of an unlicensed Mac clone.
The Apple Orchard's betting would be on Apple to win. Why? The Mac Rom chips contain the Macintosh Toolbox, a collection of software routines that programmers call on to present standard menus, dialogue boxes and other items in their applications.
This is what gives the Mac its distinctive graphic user interface and ease of use: all programs have the same "look and feel," as the trade jargon has it.
Thus, even if NuTek's technology were held not to be a copy of the Mac Rom chips, it could find itself in legal hot water for copying the Mac software"look and feel".
NuTek is unlikely to be rushed by computer makers volunteering to use its technology and risk a courtroom battle with Apple.
In any case, Apple's successful launch of the Mac Classic, and its new low-margin pricing policy, has probably pre-empted the market for cheap Mac clones.
If anyone is ever to develop a $500 Macintosh, it will be Apple itself. But don't hold your breath.
© 1991 Sydney Morning Herald