RIP, Macintosh—Is Apple ignoring its signature line of computers and laptops? Yup.

Newsweek ^ | 06/08/2010 | Daniel Lyons

[Swordmaker]

Dear Macintosh,

I hate to tell you this, but my guess is you’ve probably been sensing it already. I don’t know any good way to say it so let me just be blunt: You’ve been dropped. Dumped. It’s over.

I’m sorry. I know this hurts. But you need to face up to the truth–Steve Jobs just broke up with you. This happened yesterday at the World Wide Developers Conference. I know–why couldn’t he just do it in private? Well, you know Steve. He loves the spotlight.

So what did he talk about? He talked about iPads, and the App Store, and iBooks, and videogames. He talked about the new iPhone 4, with new video-chat software called FaceTime and a gyroscope that lets you shoot missiles into outer space and take pictures of Saturn or something. And he had lots and lots to say about his new mobile-phone operating system, which used to be called iPhone OS and now has changed its name to iOS 4.

But one thing Steve didn’t have much to say about was you. In fact, he didn’t talk about you at all. That’s not how it used to be. Remember the old days?

Why it seems like only yesterday that you, Mac, were all Steve wanted to talk about. You and your wonderful stable operating system that was so much better than Windows.

[dfwgator]

Macs are just mature, there really isn’t anything sexy about them anymore. But going away? Forget it.

[NVDave]

I dunno. I find the fact that they just work (for what I do, anyway) rather sexy.

Having a good old fashioned BSD Unix environment by opening a terminal window and hacking away in GNU Emacs without the need for some pseudo-Unix environment kludge - that’s pretty sexy for me at times too.

It is about as much fun as having a really fast SparcStation in the old days, when Solaris was a tad simpler and slimmer than it is now... but without the nonsense of X11 for a windowing system.