Apple's got a brand new PowerBook

Posted on 10 Jan 2001 at 11:00

A stunning new PowerBook was the climax of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' Macworld Expo keynote speech last night. After all the hype and all the expectation of the past few weeks, Apple has delivered the hardware.

The new Titanium G4 PowerBook has, as its name suggests, a titanium casing: the stuff, according to Jobs, "they build airplanes out of". It comes in two configurations: 128 or 256MB RAM and a 10 or 20GB hard disk, is Mac OS X ready and will be shipping by end of January at $2,599 and $3,499.

Jobs also unveiled a "whole new generation of PowerMac G4s". There will be four new G4 models all with CD-RW, 133MHz system and memory bus speeds, 30-60GB drives, AGP4x graphics (plus nVidia graphics cards in the top three models), a new audio system, four PCI slots and one AGP slot, a faster PCI bus and gigabit Ethernet. All OS X-ready, the single processor machines run at 466, 533, 667 and 733MHz. The bottom two machines will come with 120Mb RAM, the top two with 256Mb RAM. The 466 and 533 are available now; the 667 and 733 available in February.

All the 733MHz models will come with the new SuperDrive which is a rewritable CD and recordable DVD drive, and comes bundled with Apple's new DVD-authoring software iDVD. Jobs claimed that Apple has increased the speed of software encoding of high-quality MPEG-2 DVDs by 12 and a half times.

OS X will be available on 24 March for $129 and will become the default OS on new Macs from July. Apple has absorbed a lot of user feedback from the beta release with the main changes being:

• OS X dock adopts features of Apple menu
• Apple menu reintroduced with system-wide features accessible from within any application
• Font panel that works across all applications
• All toolbars customisable in OS X
• Window status bar reintroduced
• Traditional Finder features retained

Apple's new consumer DVD authoring software, iDVD looked impressive (on first impressions) and, with Apple selling blank DVD disks at $10 each, it paves the way for consumers to create their own DVDs that can be played on any consumer DVD player through the TV.

Jobs also demonstrated the impressive new free CD music recording, organising and playlisting software iTunes, which is designed to supersede all third-party music CD-writing software (it is compatible with solid state MP3 players). It also provides direct access to Internet radio, is free and available now.

The Apple CEO also announced a new professional DVD-authoring software: DVD StudioPro retailing for $995.

According to Jobs: "The Mac can become the digital hub of our new emerging digital lifestyles."

Author: Simon Aughton