CEO Jobs Demos New, Fast G4 at MacWorld Expo

N E W  Y O R K, July 19 -- Apple laid claim to the high end of thepersonal computer market with a blazingly fast, multiprocessorcomputer announced at MacWorld Expo in New York today.

And the company packed high-end power into a tiny space with itsradical new G4 Cube, a supercomputer in an 8-inch white cube on aLucite stand.

But its changes to the super-popular iMac were literally cosmetic: fournew colors and prices down to $799, but no major technology leaps.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs also once again delayed the company’s newoperating system, OS X. The “public beta” test version of the system will be released in September, rather than earlier in the summer as was anticipated. The consumer release is now scheduled for 2001.

Apple’s stock ended down 4 9/16 for the day, at 52 11/16.

Double the Pleasure

The new G4 machines, Apple’s high end, feature up to two 500 megahertzMotorola processors and are priced in the same range as today’ssingle-processor G4s. That made them double the speed of a 1-gigahertzPentium 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.

“Megahertz is important, but it’s not the only factor? Two brains are better than one,” Jobs said.

For Adobe’s popular Photoshop graphics software, and for any program running under OS X, both of which take advantage of multiprocessing, these may be the fastest personal computers on earth. But until OS X comes out, most programs won’t be able to hit top speeds.

The new machines also come with gigabit Ethernet, a super fast newnetworking standard that offers 10 times the performance of most current office networks.