CEO Jobs Demos New, Fast G4 at MacWorld Expo

N E W  Y O R K, July 19, 2000 -- 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.

Power Cubed

With the mid-range, single-processor G4s taken out of commission, Apple packed them into an 8-inch cube and released them as a newmachine.

The $1799 and $2299 G4 Cubes look unlike any other machine on themarket; 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.

“We are combining the power of the Power Mac G4 with the desktopelegance, the silence and the miniaturization that we learned from doing the iMacs,” Jobs said.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s vice president of worldwide product marketing, said the Cube was aimed at home offices and small offices where space may be at a premium.

Customers “don’t all want or need a lot of [expansion] slots. They want something that’s really fast, but simple to set up and looks good,” he said.

The Cube may also appeal to the Sharper Image crowd, “consumers who can afford more and want professional power to do cool consumer things,” he said.

iMacs of a Different Color

At the low end, Apple had a new mouse and keyboard, but no striking newtechnology for its breakthrough iMac machines.

Apple’s new optical mouse actually has no button. Users click bypressing down on the front of the mouse. It replaces the iMac’smuch-derided “hockey puck” mouse, which users have said isuncomfortable.

“The entire surface is the button — it just levers down in the front,” Jobs said.

Apple is also offering some less exclamatory colors for new iMacsthan the current screaming green and orange — dark blue, dark red,gray-green and a strange, opaque white that looks like 1970s avant-garde interior design.

The low-end iMacs are only available in blue, and the choice gets greater as you go up the line. That’s so Apple doesn’t have to produce too many different new models, Schiller said.

The breakthrough with the iMacs is the price, from a new low of $799 for the 350-megahertz base model to a $1499, 500-megahertz machinewith aggressive power and a 30 gigabyte hard drive.

“You can now get a Mercedes or BMW for the price of a Ford Taurus? The best Internet appliance on the market is iMac,” Jobs said.

Jobs said all of the new machines will be available today — except for the $799 iMac, which comes out in September, and the Cube, which will be available in August.