except (Score 1)

Losing the cloners was too bad, but I'd rather have no clones than a dying Apple. Many people, myself included, consider the new (blue & white) G3s to be an excellent value, probably Apple's best price/performance ratio ever. And, while it would be nice to have more choice of Mac hardware, Apple's prices haven't really risen any since cloning died. If anything, they've come down quite a bit (on their high end machines) and a whole hell of a lot on their consumer offering (iMac).

Again with the BeOS comments...I keep seeing this BeOS bullshit pop up after every Apple story. When will people give this one up? It's pretty obvious that Apple doesn't want Be on their hardware and Be doesn't want to waste their time maintaining the PowerPC version of BeOS when Intel is such a bigger opportunity for them.

And, don't forget, FireWire was chosen as an industry standard by the IEEE, which by the way doesn't prevent companies from profitting from these standards. Apple has been charging licensing fees for FireWire all along. The latecomers were asked to pay more, but after they made a stink Apple joined a few other companies in an effort to promote use of FireWire in the industry by creating a licensing program that they all approve of. Check here for more info on that one:

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,3 2501,00.html

- StrangeDaze