CEO Jobs Demos New, Fast G4 at Mac Expo
N E W Y O R K, July 19 -- Apple laid claim to the high end of the personal computer market with a blazingly fast, multiprocessor home computer announced at MacWorld Expo in New York today.
And the company packed high-end power into a tiny space with its radical new G4 Cube, a supercomputer in an eight-inch white cube on a Lucite stand.
But its changes to the super-popular iMac were literally cosmetic: four new colors and prices down to $799, but no major technology leaps.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs also once again delayed the company’s new operating system, OS X. The “public beta” test version of the system will be released in September, rather than this summer. The consumer release is now scheduled for 2001.
Double the Pleasure
The new G4 machines, Apple’s high end, feature up to two 500 megahertz Motorola processors and are priced in the same range as today’s single-processor G4s. That made them double the speed of a 1-gigahertz Pentium machine running Windows 2000 in a demonstration.
The machines are designed for graphics, video and Web designers, Jobs said.
“We want Apple to stand at the intersection of art and technology,” he said.
The new multiprocessor Macs neatly sidestep the lack of new Motorola chips in the past few months to compete with faster and faster chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Designs. If the demonstration results hold up, the new machines could restore Apple’s crown as making the fastest home computers on earth.
“Megahertz is important, but it’s not the only factor … Two brains are better than one,” Jobs said.
The new machines also come with gigabit Ethernet, a superfast new networking standard that offers 10 times the performance of most current office networks.
Power Cubed
With the mid-range, single-processor G4s taken out of commission, Apple decided to pack them into an eight-inch cube and release them as a new machine.
The $1799 and $2299 G4 Cubes look unlike any other machine on the market; they’re small, sleek, elegant, completely silent [they have no fan] and they feature the powerful G4 processor, which last year was rated as a supercomputer by the U.S. government.
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