Linked List: October 14, 2004

Thursday, 14 October 2004

Steve Jobs Unveils Apple Mini Stores ★

Jason Snell and Jim Dalrymple for MacCentral:

At a private viewing at Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, Calif., Apple Computer Inc. on Thursday unveiled a new 750-square-foot “mini” design for its retail store. The first six stores using the design, which Apple CEO Steve Jobs — in his first public appearance since cancer surgery — described as “designed to be small, and cool because [they] are small,” will open this Saturday.

The design is striking. Very Kubrickian. Also striking is this tidbit:

Products in the new stores are half iPod related, half Mac related, according to Jobs.

Multiple Display Spanning With the iMac G5 ★

Dan Frakes, at the Macworld Editors’ Notes Weblog:

Although many people assume that Apple’s consumer-level computers don’t support screen spanning because they use lower-end video cards or because of some other type of hardware limitation, that’s not really it — the video cards found in all of Apple’s latest consumer models fully support this feature. The real reason is that Apple has disabled extended desktop mode in Open Firmware. If you don’t know what Open Firmware is, don’t worry; the key here is that if this feature can be disabled in Open Firmware, it can also be enabled in the same way.

In other words, Apple cripples its “consumer” machines such as the iBook and iMac such that their video output to a second display is limited to mirroring, rather than spanning. An Open Firmware hack — unsupported, of course — is all it takes to enable the feature.