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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=467
The Mystery of the Missing IrDA Port
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
May 27th 2002
Infrared gone - for now - but not forgotten.
Sharp-eyed PowerBook aficionados will have spotted the absence of the venerable IR
port when they take delivery of their latest Titanium PowerBook.
Which makes it all the more mysterious when you take a sneak peak at the jpegs of the
Jaguar preview ThinkSecret has published.
An option is ''AOL Dialup'' via ''IrDA Modem''. Now, as far as I can tell, there are
now no IrDA Macs in Apple''s current model line-up which have an IrDA port. Bondi
iMacs, yes. Past Pismos, yes. Even last fortnight''s TiBook. But not now.
What? Apple incorporating support for legacy Macs? Surely not.
But it is true. IrDA isn''t dead yet, even if BlueTooth is (sorta, almost, kinda
delayed) flavor of the month. But there''s still life (no pun intended) in IrDA yet.
Your Palm and your still-not-BlueTooth cell phone, for instance. Not to mention the
minority of PowerBookers (I count myself among them) who still zap files between
PowerBooks, both ancient and modern, when the need arises. I also use it occasionally
for accessing non-Mac IrDA printers.
So is IrDA''s departure from the PowerBook a temporary au revoir? Maybe. After all,
space considerations aside, it costs Apple all of $7.50 in parts, and a moment of a
software engineer''s time, to keep the old red port in place.
Do you want IrDA back? Has Apple ruined your Palm/cell phone investments? Let''s not
start a petition, but we''d be interested to know how many people actually use it. Or
is there a BlueTooth PCMCIA card in your future?
Post your comments at:
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=467
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Copyright (c) 2001 Insanely Great Mac. All rights reserved. This article
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