August 1998, Vol. 9, No. 8

iMac attack

Apple’s newest machine signals a rebirth for the publishing stalwart

Stuffed in a corner of the Apple booth at NEXPO ’98, held June 20-23 in Orlando, Fla., was a unique device.

Designed for the consumer market, it was a prototype of the newest model of Macintosh computer, the iMac (the "i" stands for Internet; some trade publication editors feel compelled to upper-case the "i"; not we). The one-piece unit didn't look like any computer ever sold before.

On the Saturday night of NEXPO, we were chatting about what we had seen on the show floor. Correspondent Christopher J. Feola was hot about this new iMac -- hell, he was hot about Apple, too.

Now, if you ask, Feola (who works days as director of the Media Center at the American Press Institute of Reston, Va.) will tell you he’s used Macs since they came out in the mid-'80s. When they were the only computer that did pre-press and graphics, he worked with a lot of them. He'll wax eloquently in print or e-mail about his long and successful career with Macs.

He'll write you that elegy to Apple sitting in front of a Windows machine.

I, on the other hand, use Macs primarily (they not only publish our newsletters and all the ancillary material, they power our web site as well). I have used DOS and Windows and Windows NT (not to mention CP/M and UNIX), so I know what goes on in the rest of the world. I still prefer my Macintosh (see The Cole Papers, November 1996 and October 1997).

Feola and I had crossed swords earlier in the year when the iMac was announced. He had pronounced the machine dumb -- no printer port, no floppy drive.

I said those two reasons also made me uncomfortable about the iMac’s future on the consumer market. But those features -- along with what I anticipate will be a street price of less than $1000 before Christmas -- make it an ideal newspaper machine.

After Feola got a hands-on demo (he apparently was treated slightly better at NEXPO than most -- the reports I got were that Apple employees had been instructed to keep attendees' hands off the machine) and he explored an interesting newspaper front-end system developed in Korea on the NextStep development environment (now part of Apple), he is singing the praises of the iMac, as you'll see inside.

With the release of the iMac just days away (Aug. 15), it is once again important for the publishing industry to evaluate where Apple is going -- remember, we're one of the company’s two main core markets. Feola gives us a good -- and for a Windows geek, a relatively unbiased -- look at that future.

Also inside, Correspondent Marion J. Love walks us through the various products for on-line classifieds shown at the Connections trade show and NEXPO. It’s a bewildering thicket through which she guides us well.

Correspondent L. Carol Christopher sends us postcards from the edges of NEXPO, where she found many exhibitors who had interesting, if not necessarily core, products. Those booths are invariably on the edges of the show.

Lastly, we welcome aboard a new correspondent, Steven E. Brier. A former newspaper systems editor (The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, the New York Times), Brier is now a free-lance writer who will be appearing in these pages (as well as our sibling publication NewsInc .) on a regular basis.

Brier’s debut article is about how suppliers are beginning to use web browser technology as front-ends to their systems -- including front-ends.

I Mac, you Mac, we all Mac for the iMac.

-- David M. Cole

See also Hellbox.

From THE COLE PAPERS, August 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.