Apple, serious at last.

Apple media event

Steve Jobs held an Apple media event yesterday. Announced was the above Apple consumer Mac, the iMac, that will ship in August for around US$1299. It comes with a 233MHz G3, 4GB Hard drive, 24X CD-ROM, 15" monitor, 32 MB RAM. 512K L2 cache, 10/100 Ethernet and a few more Blah Blah's. Of main interest to current Mac owners is that it has dual USB (Universal Serial Bus) instead of the normal Macintosh serial ports and ADB (Apple Desktop Bus). Since these items (as well as SCSI, floppy drive and expansion slots) are not listed by Apple as on this model, the new iMac may not be able to connect to current Macintosh peripherals such as printers, keyboards, mice and other external hardware (we'll have to wait until it ships to make sure though). This shouldn't be too much of a problem for first time buyers, as there are plenty of USB devices available in the PC world already that could be used instead, but if you have external hardware already, you'll need to upgrade the whole lot if you plan on replacing your current computer with an iMac.

Introduced at the Media event as well was Apple's new European AppleStore as well as the Education AppleStore.

Also introduced, the long awaited new PowerBook G3 range (there is a MacWorld review here , think configure).

New chips from Motorola

Motorola will be announcing this week new PowerPC chips equipped with a new "execution unit" to add to the current Integer and Floating Point Units. The new Vector Unit will be able to crunch data up to 16 times the speed of the old chips, but programs have to be re-written to take advantage of it.

The new Technology is being called "AltiVec" and is partly an answer to Intel's MMX, but also similar technology in Sun's Spark and Digital's Alpha chips. The new technology also has applications outside just speeding up PhotoShop though, for instance it could allow a chip to control 30 28.8Kb modems, as compared to a specialised digital signal processor (DSP) that can currently handle only 8.

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