Michael Dell's Incorrect Claims Redux: Off By A Year

by , 4:00 PM EDT, August 29th, 2001

This morning, we reported on some claims made by Michael Dell in an interview published in TechnologyReview. The claim that Mr. Dell made was that "we were the first to integrate wireless into notebooks, with integrated antennas." In our report, we said that Dell had shipped the Latitude C600 and C800 with integrated 802.11b antennas in October of 1999, just one month after Apple shipped the original iBook.

It turns out that we were incorrect: Dell shipped those two models in October of 2000, a full year and one month after Apple shipped the iBook, making Mr. Dell's claims all the more absurd. The products were announced on September 25th, 2000, and began shipping the next month. This was more than six months after Apple began shipping the "Pismo" models of the PowerBook that were also equipped with built-in support for 802.11b (AirPort).

We have contacted Dell to ask for comment, and will include such comment when it reaches us.

If you want the background story, check out our report from this morning. We would like to thank the Observer who pushed us to dig further and pointed out the discrepancy in this morning's report.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Michael Dell can pretend all he wants that Apple is irrelevant, but for him to have made this claim is beyond preposterous, it is irresponsible. Every PC company in the world was watching Apple experiment with AirPort, and we have no doubt that this includes Dell. Shame on TechnologyReview for not doing a bit of fact-checking as well.