Mac Chatter - The Best & Worst Mac Forum Posts From Around The Web

by , 10:00 AM EST, January 25th, 2002

Our new Mac Chatter series gathers up some of the juiciest, silliest, most outrageous, and most interesting discussion about the Mac industry from around the Web. Raena Armitage scours the forums, message boards, and article comments from some of the most (and least) popular hangouts in the Mac Web and beyond.

"Maybe the new tower will have an inbuilt iWalk," says Gary Patterson over at the MacAddict Forums. Rumor fans are a-flutter with reports of a new dual 1GHz G4 coming up soon, and as always, it's spurring the usual speculation and comments among Mac users about what Apple and Motorola 'should' be doing. As you'd expect, everyone's got something to say, and we're all Monday's experts with the benefit of hindsight. Still, it's interesting to see what the punters have got to say for themselves.

Please note that we have left the quoted posts "as-is," including bad punctuation, bad spelling, and bad writing.

AppleScripting "To Catch A Thief"

On Thursday, we pointed you to a story about how a burglary victim used AppleScript and Timbuktu to not only find the stolen iMac, but to erase personal files and eventually catch the thief! This comment comes from Rinikusu over at Slashdot in that site's mention of the same story:

If you were really serious about inflicting pain, how about:

setting up one of those $125 per call phone lines in the bahamas and then having the imac call it every 2 minutes... repeatedly call 911 and play recorded message: "help! I've fallen and I can't get up!" over and over again install a keylogger so you can post their most intimate conversations on your website. those are just a few ideas that have popped in my head..

The New iMac

This tasty little rant about the new iMac, by poster OhTwo, was culled from the Accelerate Your Mac! forums -

It's butt ugly from a visual design standpoint. Take the Aiport flying saucer and stick on a monitor appendage. From what I've read Jobs was inspired from a sunflower (!). Jobs is also a frustrated artist, but I think he should take up the cello. The base and screen are completely incongruous, the only unity made is that the two are white, which as all fat ladies know makes things look larger.

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Of G4s & More

'cdhostage' from the MacNN forums writes:

It's disappointing to think that Apple can't find a source by hook or by crook of faster G4s though. Apple should go and steal the [Motorola] plans with the elite ninja squad and hire a disreputable plant in Asia to produce high clockspeed G4s.

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It's gonna take money, a whole lot of spendin' money...

Every would-be financial expert proclaiming to all and sundry that Apple is on its last legs (again...) needs a copy of this post from our own forums, where DawnTreader expertly puts the smackdown to the 'market share' non-argument:

...don't let Apple's small market share fool you. Apple isn't in the market share game per se, they are in the game for high-margin market share.

In the 3rd calendar quarter Apple averaged just over 30% gross margins. It's the envy of the computer business. Look at it from Dell's perspective. Apple represents not only $6 billion in sales, but also $1.8 billion in gross margin. That's a lot of high-margin business and cash for the Wintel cartel to lose.

Just like the high volume general retailers are beginning to learn, after they have put most of their traditional competitors out of business, what needs be done to continue to grow revenue and maintain historical levels of earning growth?

Dell may put Gateway out of business. But what comes next? A goodly portion of Gateway's high-margin sales will flow to Apple, not Dell. Dell will benefit from increased sales at Gateway's expense, but many of Gateway's customers that purchased more expensive machines in the past will take a close look at Apple products before looking at Dell's products.

Uhhhh....

And finally, from the "Buh?" department, a MacMonkey forums poster said thus:

i think this new imac is worth getting. well as long as you can install an internet onto windows or what have you. Otherwise this new imac will hit big.

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Have you seen something in a Mac forum that you think is interesting? Send it to Raena! Have some speculation of your own? Why not leap into the discussion at our own forums?