Dear Steve Jobs

Yay! Apple is renewing its commitment to educators, scientists, and engineers.

Is there something Apple could do to bring Mathworks back into the fold? Mathworks announced last week that it's stopping development of MATLAB for the Mac, because of poor sales. This is terrible for us and most scientists and engineers that use Macs, but we can't ask Mathworks to ignore sales figures.

We need MATLAB. All our work depends on it, both teaching and research. Our (free) MATLAB extensions for Mac are used by hundreds of our colleagues, at universities all over the world. The Mathworks' announcement has forced us to begin planning a migration to Wintel. We'd much prefer to stay on the Mac, but we need MATLAB. We imagine that this is the case for scientists and engineers in all fields.

Can Apple woo Mathworks back? You're our only hope.

Sincerely yours

Denis Pelli
Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU
Apple Partner

David Brainard
Associate Professor of Psychology
University of California, Santa Barbara

P.S. The MATLAB web site is <http://www.mathworks.com/>. Our free MATLAB extensions for vision researchers are at <http://color.psych.ucsb.edu/kemo.html>.

P.P.S. Last summer we sent a letter to Avie Tevanian, signed by 100 colleagues, asking Apple to consider the needs of scientists in the specification of Rhapsody. The text of our letter is available at <http://vision.nyu.edu/Tips/YellowBox.html>.