Apple Gets A Buffing Up

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday October 12, 1999

GARRY BARKER THINKS DIFFERENT

IT WAS a good week for Apple. At the special event in Cupertino where it all came out last Wednesday, even Steve Jobs was moved as he showed his new babies - and he knew what was coming.

It was quite a package. Three all-new iMacs - like musketeers named Good, Better and Best.

Mac OS9 was pronounced ready to ship, Apple shares rose another 5 per cent, and, as if in celebration, Jobs shaved off his beard.

Here in Australia, Apple marketing chief, Ben Bowley, said with one of the machines priced at less than $2,000 it was "right on the button for Christmas and next year's school markets".

First deliveries from Apple's Singapore factory are expected within a fortnight.

The new iMacs, which Jobs said are the best machines Apple has yet shipped, are a considerable step up on the original models they now replace. Even setting aside brand bias, there is nothing yet to match them in the Wintel arena; nothing so equipped out of the box to meet the home, school and small business user.

They are faster, quieter, more powerful, a little more compact and also cheaper, even here in the land of the Australian peso.

The new, entry-level, "good" model, available only in blueberry, will sell locally for $1,995 - $400 less than the recommended retail price of previous iMacs.

The "better", mid-range, available in all five "fruity" colours, is priced here at $2,595, and "best" is a totally new upper-crust iMac wearing the polished graphite-grey livery of the new G4 high-end Macs, that's $2,995.

For this you get a 400MHz G3 PowerPC processor that handles work at twice the speed of a 550MHz Pentium III, 128Mb of RAM as standard, and a 13Gb Ultra ATA hard drive and much else besides, incl- uding iMovie, a consumer video editing package developed by the Final Cut Pro team, and two FireWire ports.

Cosmetically these are great computers, but it is under those sleek translucent cases that Apple has stacked the features.

For example, the top-of-the-range "Special Edition" new iMac in the slinky graphite-grey case offers full-featured, digital video editing right out of the box.

There is nothing in the beige-box PC market to match that, and certainly not at the price.

For Apple in Australia, where video editing is now being included in school curriculums, the machines could not have come at a better time.

Given that the scholastic price of the mid- and upper-range iMacs will be well under $3,000, we should now see further major growth of Macintosh use in Australian schools.

But that new "best" iMac gives one the very strong feeling that there's a good deal yet to come from Cupertino.

Expansion of the iMac range to emulate the three-machine, "good, better, best" pattern set by the blue-and-white G3s (to which one may now add the graphite-grey G4), raises some intriguing prospects.

For instance, might we now expect to see the iBook range produced in three "good, better, best" configurations - with a "Special Edition" in slinky graphite-grey for business folk who like the specification of the light, powerful iBook, but who cannot quite see a tangerine laptop as the ideal accessory for their Armani suit?

Equally, will the still very stylish black G3 PowerBooks begin to show up in translucent "executive" grey and, possibly, with 500MHz G4 processors and spiffing hi-fi sound systems to complement their movie-playing DVD systems?

"There are some really exciting messages in this for us," said Bowley. "We will have a recommended retail price on the "good" model of $1,995 and that is a very big price band in Australia. It's a market we have not played in for a long time and we are now there at a very important time, just before Christmas.

"And it does it not with a stripped-down PC but with a fully-featured machine with 64Mb of RAM, a 350MHz processor, wireless networking on board, ethernet, modem, lots of bundled software - everything on board, all at less than $2,000."

All of the new iMacs have G3 processors, the "better" mid-range, iMac DV, and the "best" top-end, iMac Special Edition, at 400MHz.

All have ATA Rage 128 VR 2D/3D high-end graphics accelerator cards to satisfy dedicated gamers. Standard memory is 64Mb, expandable to 512Mb, though the "Special Edition" machine comes with 128Mb fitted.

All iMacs now have a new sound system based on US high-fidelity company Harmon Kardon's Odyssey technology which is also now not troubled by the whine of a cooling fan. The iMac's PowerPC processor now runs cool enough to make convection airflow sufficient. The rather fragile old PowerBook-style CD-ROM tray has gone, replaced by the first slot-load CD system to be seen in a desktop computer.

All have the Airport wireless antennae first seen on the iBook to suit the accessory transmitter/receiver card for instant cableless networking. Traditional networking (and cable modem connection) is also available through built-in 10/100 Base T Ethernet and all have dual USB ports and built-in 56Kbps modems.

In the two upper models CD has been replaced by DVD (still slot-loaded) so movies may be played on the new 15-inch "short-neck" CRT monitors giving 1,024 x 768 resolution.

"Better" has a 10Gb drive and "best" a monster of 13Gb. Both have two 400 Mbps FireWire ports (for connecting such items as video cameras) and come with iMovie editing software included in the price.