The Apple scene has been particularly interesting in the last few months. OS X has moved up to prime time with the arrival of Jaguar (10.2) The former free iTools has been revised as .Net (oops, sorry – a natural mistake) I mean .Mac and, best of all, now we can pay for the name change. The no show Pro Macs at MWNY have finally appeared with their latest “blistering, Pentium crushing” MHz increase. All things Mac seem to be in place and the world is a wonderful place. Or is it?

To X or not to X?
As a money strapped consumer, I have some issues with Apple. This is part of the normal love/hate relationship of a Mac devotee and the mother ship. At the moment, I am a non-adaptor of OS X preferring to remain with the dead and buried 9.1. I would love to upgrade but my aging beige G3 tower apparently does not play well with X and my peripherals, a serial port printer and SCSI scanner, are left hanging in a kind of no mans land. The solution I have decided is not the upgrade route but a new computer with the latest gizmos. But, in case I need to remind you, that costs money.

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Sometimes you just got to laugh at some of the posturing that goes on the corporate world. Take the war of words between Steve Jobs and Kevin Browne of M$. Kevin, who is head of M$ Mac Business Unit is one of the good guys overall in the Mac software world. Recently, he stated that it was Apple’s fault that Office X is selling at roughly 50% of M$ expectations. Apple wasn’t promoting OSX, so therefore, Office X wasn’t selling. Kevin is correct in the fact that Apple hasn’t promoted OSX. It has let the Apple media do the work both online and in print. Apple, I expect would reason, people who already have an OSX ready machine don’t need to be pounded with TV ads. As for new machine buyers, selling hardware is much sexier and easier than software. Afterall, people know that Apple hardware is well ahead of the Wintel world in design.

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Another week, another story. What a great country we live in. Last week it was M$’ low Office X sales. This week, the possibility of Intel/AMD inside a Mac. Many articles and readers opinions have been based on the emotional side of the argument. Now it’s time to look at a few of the issues from a factual base.

One: PowerPC chips are not Motorola’s main business. The G3/G4 is not a major revenue stream for the company. They don’t put forth the financial effort into R&D. Secondly, Motorola is bleeding cash left and right. I personally keep waiting for them to sell of the G3/G4 business to IBM, since their business model is all over the road according some business pundits

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Okay folks, time for a brief trip back in time. Remember the first time you personally participated in a “fad”? C’mon, don’t be embarrassed. You remember it, no matter how silly it was. Now, I’m not talking about the times when you were a kid, and you did something, or made mom and dad buy you some stupid-but-fun toy, “because everyone else did”. No, I am talking about the first time you went in on a fad, with knowledge and full understanding of what you were doing.

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Like many teachers, the first of August brings about return to an educators mind set. I begin to jot down lesson plan ideas, visit bookstores, and re watch a slew of videos. One additional event is my annual reading of Clifford Stoll’s thought provoking work, High Tech Heretic. It is an excellent counter-weight to my tech-teacher mind set. It is not a dry ponderous read, just the opposite, a very snappy and sharp questioning of where our educational system is heading. I equate it to a weekend conversation around the BBQ while the meal is cooking. For those of you who don’t know, Stoll is astrophysicist at the University of Berkeley and a critic of how computers have permeated our society. He was a commentator on MSNBC’s “The Site”, in my opinion the best program that network ever broadcast.

In High Tech Heretic, Stoll goes after the foolish implementation of computers in the classroom as a savior for education. According to his thesis, computers are used as a clean, artificial replacement to hands-on learning. He writes: “When I teach astronomy to sixth graders, I start with an evening under the stars, not by passing out floppy disks crammed with Hubble Space Telescope images. A love of astronomy-an awe of the universe-begins by looking at the heavens, not by staring into cyberspace.” (p. On this point and many other examples he gives of actual versus cyber experiences Stoll is absolutely correct. The real thing is always a better learning tool.

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