Every once in awhile I’ll make a statement here like “If you want the PC of the future, get a Mac today”. Well, it’s still true. This week Microsoft is hosting the WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) in Seattle. WinHEC is traditionally about seriously geeky stuff – the inner nuts and bolts of Windoze. At the keynote address earlier this week, Bill Gates trumpeted (now, hold onto your hats) – a wireless keyboard and mouse based on the Bluetooth networking protocol. If you search through the extensive archives at macmaineiac.com, you’ll see that Apple brought this technology to market in October of 2003. Not bad, Bill. Billions of research dollars and you’re only six months late for the Bluetooth boat.

Now, this is bordering on absurd. During his revelatory glimpse into the future of computing, Mr. Gates announced “for the first time, I can say that the floppy disk is dead”. Hallelujah! Now that it has come from “on high”, you can start trashing those floppies. Macs haven’t shipped with floppy drives since 1998, and you know, we haven’t missed them one bit.

Next up for Microsoft? Prepare for the hype around the upcoming release of “Windows XP Reloaded”. Does Microsoft have an original, creative bone in their corporate body? Windows XP Reloaded? Note to M$ marketing – “The Matrix” was about a computer program that took over the world and enslaved all the people and… Oh, wait. Maybe the name fits after all. I guess it’ll sound better to the minions than “Windows XP Rebooted”.

But the real star of WinHEC will be “Longhorn”, Microsoft’s next generation operating system. According to the latest timeline, Longhorn will stampede onto PCs sometime in the second half of this decade. A beta will be available to the intrepid sometime in 2005. Microsoft has released what it describes as the “average” computer configuration required to run Longhorn. Get out your checkbook.

A dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz. A minimum of 2GB of RAM. Up to a terabyte of storage. A 1 gigabit Ethernet port, and 802.11g wireless link. And, a graphics processor that runs three times faster than any available on the market today. Wow.

Or, you can have most of this computer system today. It’s called a PowerMac G5 running Mac OS X. Oh, did I mention Mac OS X can’t be “Sassered”? Have a great second half of the decade.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski