Macintosh

SAN FRANCISCO - Steven Jobs, chief executive of Apple Computer, announced an alliance with IBM last week that will add a powerful IBM-designed 64-bit microprocessor chip to Apple computers. The move is a bid to stay innovative and independent in a computing world dominated by Microsoft and Intel. Introduction of the G5 chip, industry analysts said, is crucial to keeping Apple competitive with the ubiquitous Intel Pentium-based personal computers and to jump-start sales of Apple's Macintosh personal computers, which have been relatively flat.

The biggest drawback of the new Apple Macintosh Classic is that it is sometimes difficult to find.The Classic was introduced nearly three months ago, but it is only now starting to appear in stores in significant numbers, and Apple Computer Inc. says that orders could be backlogged until April."

For some people, the ritual of paying bills ranks right up there with cleaning the toilet. The job has to be done, but it's distasteful and tedious.Now, a handful of banks, computer software publishers and on-line computer services offer to handle the chore for you. They advertise electronic payment and home-banking services that make paying bills a breeze, eliminate the need to walk to the mailbox and even save you the cost of stamps.BillPay USA and Checkfree, two computerized services, let users DTC pay any bills, from major corporations such as American Express to the local plumber, and on whatever day of the month the user wants.

Hugh Macintosh, a civil engineer who had lived and worked in Iran, died Monday of lymphoma at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Lutherville resident was 68. Mr. Macintosh was born in Nantwich, England, and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. After earning his degree in civil engineering from the University of Edinburgh, he spent time traveling through Europe. "He rode the Borough, the same type of motorcycle that Lawrence of Arabia rode," said a daughter, Andrea Macintosh Whiteway of Potomac. Mr. Macintosh worked for an engineering firm in Manchester, England, until joining International Management and Engineering Group, a company that built pipelines in Iran.

AFTER SIX MONTHS on the job, Heidi Roizen, a former software developer who is now Apple Computer Inc.'s head of developer relations, says she has identified Apple's biggest problem."

MEMBERS OF the so-called Macintosh community get extremely touchy when anyone so much as hints that the Mac might not be the coolest, most elegant electronic device in the known universe.Macintosh engenders a sort of fanaticism unknown among the competition; no one ever refers to a "Windows community." But then, Windows users, who constitute the vast majority, tend not to think of themselves as members of some elite group.Macintosh computers still offer several advantages over their Windows counterparts.

There are few things sadder, or more annoying, than a computer gone bad. Take my computer, please.Save file.Actually, the Apple Macintosh Powerbook Duo System itself may not be bad. The problem may have been a hiccup in the copy of Microsoft Word 5.1 that was working on it.The truth may never be known because a copy of Safe and Sound, a new "emergency disk" utility, failed to find a problem with the Powerbook Duo 230 that ate my column. And that's good, maybe.Save file.Safe and Sound is essentially the same Diskfix application found in Central Point Software's Mac Tools 2.0 utility program.

IN OLDEN DAYS, when Apple Computer Inc.'s graying senior executives were young and when cool technology was epitomized by hot-rod automobiles instead of computers, it was fashionable in some quarters to paint flames on the side of the car to indicate great speed.There are several reasons not to paint flames on Apple's new Powerbook 1400 portable Macintosh computer. First, it conjures up unpleasant memories of the ill-fated Powerbook 5300 series, which counted among its many quirks a propensity, though a rare one, for spontaneous combustion.

MONTEREY, Calif. -- Apple Computer Inc. said yesterday that it will introduce a Macintosh operating system in 1998 that will be able to run on any microprocessor.Chairman Gilbert Amelio, in a speech to analysts and investors, said the new operating system will run some older applications, but will have a new core of software code that enables it to run on chips from Intel Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and others -- as well as the Motorola Inc. processor used now.Apple's machines now run only on the PowerPC chip, a limitation that has hampered acceptance in a world increasingly dominated by machines featuring Intel chips and Microsoft Corp.

If you have iPod envy but no Mac to match it, SONICblue's new RioRiot digital music player might be what you're waiting for. Although slightly bigger and less elegant than Apple's svelte digital music player, the $399 RioRiot holds four times as much as the original iPod. SonicBlue says the device's 20-gigabyte hard drive holds 400 albums worth of music, a figure I can't dispute - after spending hours pouring 474 of my favorite songs into it, I still had 17.5 gigabytes of space to spare.