Apple pulled the curtain back on its new line of G4s yesterday at MacWorld San Francisco. Turning an unimpressed eye to the release of the Pentium 4, Steve Jobs proudly announced the release of the 'Speed to Burn' campaign. As he announced in December, Apple had missed the boat on the CDR market when it put together its past G4 lineups. As the name of the campaign suggests, Apple is configuring the new lineup to remedy that oversight.
Four new system configurations were introduced today. Each of the machines will offer a CDRW drive from the factory. Processor speed ranges from 466MHz to 733MHz. Prices range from $1699 - $3499 respectively. Apple's new lineup also consists of mostly single processor G4s. The 466MHz model will be available in a dual processor configuration via Apple's online store. Citing the availability of processors as the sole reason for the new configurations sporting only single processors, Jobs assured MacWorld patrons that dual processors configurations would be available in the future.
Taking his pledge to not make the same mistake again, Jobs also went on to explain that the high end configuration will come equipped with a combined CDR-W/DVD-R drive. If that comes as a surprise, it is because only Apple and Compaq have publicly admitted looking into the DVD-R option for their systems. Apple's announcement today makes them the first to actively bring the technology to the market, thereby leapfrogging the competition.
Apple is shipping all systems as OSX certified meaning these configurations have been fully tested for compatibility. OSX is firmly scheduled for release on Saturday, March 24th 2001.
All but the 466MHz configuration will ship with NVIDIA GeForce2 MX graphics cards in the 4X AGP slot. The 466MHz will ship with a RAGE 128 Pro graphics card in the AGP slot. Jobs also noted that the PCI bus has been reworked, removing the PCI Bridge among other components, to further PCI performance. Also added was a 4th PCI slot. Apple now follows PC manufacturers in counting the AGP slot as a PCI slot (now there are four PCI slots and one additional AGP slot).
Jobs also compared the new 733MHz machine to a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 on stage using Photoshop 6.0 as a bench of speed. In the test, both machines rendered a 110MB file using the same set of 140+ actions scripted to build the final image. The G4 finished in 24 seconds, where the Pentium finished in 36 seconds. By this example the G4 is 33% faster than a Pentium at twice the clock rate. Elaborating on his point even further, Jobs explained that if we were to compare Apples to apples, the G4 would equate to a 2GHz processor in Pentium terms.
In other news, Apple took a big step towards eliminating the need for Toast CD authoring software today. The new systems will be able to burn CD ROMS from the desktop. Simply insert the blank CD into the drive and the OS recognizes it as blank. It asks what type of disc it will be, music or HFS/HFS+, and then the blank media appears on the desktop. Simply drag the files you want onto the CD icon as if it was another hard disk and the files are linked to the CD. According to Jobs, when you drag the CD icon to the trash to eject it, the Finder asks you if you want to burn the CD. Click yes, and the disk ejects after the CD is finished writing.
Apple also announced it was dropping the price of its 15" flat panel display to $799. Apple will also offer a set of G4 styled speakers at the Apple store for $59.
