Getting Jobsed

I was look­ing through some old draft posts I never man­aged to fin­ish, and came across one I intended to pub­lish about Mac­world this past Jan­u­ary. The big news, of course, was the release of Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers run­ning the Intel chip instead of Motorola/IBM’s Pow­erPC chip. Fully six months ahead of the announced schedule.

The prob­lem was, the machine that was announced was the iMac, nearly iden­ti­cal to the much slower G5 iMac announced not three months ear­lier. Many peo­ple had bop­ught the brand new iMac just before Mac­world, never dream­ing that Apple would so thor­oughly update that very com­puter just three months later.

But they did, imme­di­ately ren­der­ing obso­lete (or at least 2-3x slower) the brand new iMacs of many Apple customers.

This gave rise to the term, “Get­ting Job­sed,” first heard (by me) on Matthew Haughey’s web site. Also amus­ing was Jason Kottke’s let­ter seek­ing sup­port from Apple.

Ouch. It still stings.