[rickray1]

I hear that IR does not work on a Lombard with OS X.
It does work on a Pismo with firewire. What gives?

[mugwump]

Isn't the reason obvious? They need to sell as many new Powerbooks as possible. Instead of increasing marketshare, they have pulled a Bill Gates and simply stopped supporting this $3500 machine that was sold thru January 2000.

The business side of the company has to justify their bonuses somehow, so they convinced themselves that they can and they should begin to cannibalize performance of these machines.

--DVD playback does not exist for these machines in OS X. They actually tried to justify this by saying that the processor (G3 400) could not provide adequate playback in OS X. A blatant lie.

--quicktime is not supported with this machine, becase they refuse to release the drivers for the graphics card. A slow OS sells more machines, they reason.

--No infared support for these machines. Again, they need to get users to buy new powerbooks.

There aren't MANY powerbook owners who would spend another $3000 to go from a G3 400 lombard to a weak and slow g4 667. Sure it would be an improvment, but MOST owners will not budge, no matter how the coporation tries to dream up greater sales.

[ 04-14-2002: Message edited by: mugwump ]

[cdhostage]

I am afraid that I must agree with the second post. Apple is pulling some seriously not nice maneovers in order to cut costs for development of hsofwarte and support for older machines.

Thank God my Pismo works just fine.[/LIST]

[bighead]

One of the many beauties of OS X is its open-source foundations. What does this mean? Research things and write your own driver. Apple provides developer tools for free, so get out and start writing. If it works well, you can even release it as shareware and make some money off of it.

[raphaelf]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by mugwump:

DVD playback does not exist for these machines in OS X. They actually tried to justify this by saying that the processor (G3 400) could not provide adequate playback in OS X. A blatant lie.

Is this really that important? If it is, you can always use OS 9.

--quicktime is not supported with this machine, becase they refuse to release the drivers for the graphics card. A slow OS sells more machines, they reason.

That's funny, I didn't run into any problems with Quicktime using OS 10.0.4+ on a Wallstreet 266 with 192MB RAM.

--No infared support for these machines. Again, they need to get users to buy new powerbooks.

I don't know anyone who actually uses IR. Have you tried bluetooth?

There aren't MANY powerbook owners who would spend another $3000 to go from a G3 400 lombard to a weak and slow g4 667. Sure it would be an improvment, but MOST owners will not budge, no matter how the coporation tries to dream up greater sales.


If I had a lombard I wouldn't upgrade to a Tibook, either, especially if it were my own money. Then again, IR and DVD aren't exactly make-or-break technologies for me. You can always use OS 9.