Apple stock went up again, closing at $85.59. With this, Apple surpassed Dell in market cap ($72 billion). May not mean much, but some people were looking forward to it.

Apparently the new Intel Macs have a file called /System/Library/Extensions/Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext.

A 2004 paper on FireWire (pdf!) by WiebeTech’s CEO is making the rounds again. Basically, it makes the point that Apple bungled FW800 and that it will continue to be a niche market for some pro peripherals; it also says that the upcoming FW1600 and FW3200 won’t make it to market, as SATA and SATA II are lower-cost and faster. For what it’s worth, I’ve personally seen only one FW800 drive and it wasn’t working at the time, although I have several FW400 peripherals and prefer them over the USB2.0 alternatives. So the missing FW800 on the new Macs is no hardship for me.

Seems that the previously little-known ExpressCard is the new generation PCCard/PCMCIA/Cardbus. Its high speed bus interface would allow a MacBook Pro to have two FW800 or one SATA drives connected. Apparently it’s one more technology from the PC side that languished unused until Apple picked it up; for instance, ExpressCard digital camera card readers have just been announced. (This is the only type of PCCard I found useful in my PowerBook…) There are several more products out; this should be interesting.

Heh; did Steve Jobs really cut some “very cool stuff” from the keynote because of last-minute snags? That would explain that first hour which consisted mostly of what Brazilians call, very pithily, “filling sausages”… let’s see what the next few months will bring.

There’s a blurry photo of the iMac Core Duo’s innards. About what I expected; this certainly isn’t a standard Intel motherboard.

More anon.