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Macintosh SIG
by John Willner, NOCCC - November 30, 2001 at 17:51:34:
Casey Dechter from Sonnet Technologies gave us an outstanding presentation on her company's upgrade products. We had the LCD projector. She had a very professional Power Point file on her notebook computer. That combination, in full color and with photographs, was much better than what we used to do in the past with overhead foils.The interesting point is that as Apple introduces new products, Sonnet designs and provides processor replacement components for older computers that nearly match top performance of the latest models. With each release prices are dropped on earlier versions. Thus, there are upgrades for Macintosh 4xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx, 7xxx, 8xxx and 9xxx models up through this year's G3s and G4s. That includes certain earlier iMacs. A dual processor card is already available for G4 computers with AGP graphics. These upgrades generally cost from 1/3 to 1/5 of a new computer. Hence, all earlier peripherals can be preserved while clock speeds are generally increased up to 2 or 3 times.
Sonnet also produces USB/Firewire PCI cards, and ATA66/ATA100 interfaces to these lower cost hard drives. However, perhaps the most interesting new product is the Piccolo flash memory device. It is about the size of a car key, has a USB connector at one end and provides 32MB, 64MB, 128MB or 256MB storage. No power connections are required and it is cross platform compatible. While USB is not the fastest interface in the world, the handiness of simply plugging another Picollo memory module into any USB port when more memory is needed makes a lot of sense. It goes well with the latest power books and digital photography applications.
We had a contest for two coffee cups, ball point pens for everyone, and considerable discussion on compatibility issues. Promotions that included RAM were mentioned as well as the potential for more bargains at MacWorld San Francisco in January.
OS X.2 is out (Beta version), as well as OS 9.2 In fact these upgrades were being given away at Microcenter up until October 31. You had to have an earlier version of OS X and OS 9.1 in order to take advantage. Operating speeds are enhanced and there are other improvements. Since these two upgrades are now installed, they will be demonstrated at our December meeting.
We will also discuss who will actually be the second NOCCC representative at MacWorld, since three people have expressed an interest.
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