 | Volume 5: No. 38 |
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CEO Michael Spindler says that Apple is not looking for a merger, but may be forced to sell parts of its current business to focus on core markets. Reuters reports that most surveyed industry executives think Apple will survive its current problems -- which are said to include $1B in back orders. [iNews. NewtNews, 10/16/95. Bill Park.] (I should have such problems.)
A recent Gartner Group study found that companies supporting both Mac and Windows platforms spend no more than those supporting Windows alone. In fact, costs drop as the Mac percentage goes up because Mac support costs 25% less than Windows. (This was before Windows 95, for whatever effect that upgrade may have.) [TidBITS, 10/16/95.]
There is a rumor that Apple's board of directors has decided to back the Newton strongly. There may be a new project to link Newton OS with MacOS, which could someday permit Macs to offer a Newton interface. [NewtNews, 10/16/95. Bill Park.]
The Newton MP150 will be available soon, with improved handwriting recognition software from Richard Lyon's group at Apple ATG. Although the Newton hasn't "taken off" yet, it does have 15% of the PDA market. (That's based on 400K sold. Other estimates put it at 110K to 200K, including the versions from Motorola and Sharp.) Dow Jones News reports (9/22/95) that Apple has invested $300M in the Newton, and that there are over 1000 applications available. A larger "slate" device is said to be in the works, developed jointly with Panasonic. John Markoff of the NYT recently gave Newton OS 2.0 a good review. [NewtNews, 9/25/95. Bill Park.]
One new Mac product is an Apple Chinese Dictation Kit that recognizes 350K phrases of spoken Mandarin. [NewtNews, 10/16/95. Bill Park.] (Is Mandarin less co-articulated than European languages? Or is it that the syllables are fewer in number and more regularly spaced?]
Cult of Macintosh is a high-quality WWW site for Mac lovers,
from Juhani "Jussi" Sirkia The AppleScript, Frontier, Nisus, and QuicKeys
scripting archives at
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