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Apple follows up beauty with iMac 'beast'
By John Yaukey, Gannett News Service
h..p://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/review/2002/2/12/apple-powermac.htm
Apple Computer
Apple's new dual-processor Power Mac outperforms Intel's 2-GHz chip, the company says.
Apple kicked off 2002 with the beauty: the stunning new iMac with the floating flat panel display. Now it's following up with the beast: a new line of Power Macs, one of which boasts twin 1-gigahertz (GHz) G4 PowerPC chips by Motorola. Philip Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing at Apple, is billing this new Power Mac as "the fastest Mac ever, and the fastest personal computer ever for creative professionals."
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The high-end machine also contains Nvidia's new GeForce4 graphics card and a SuperDrive that can burn DVDs and CDs.
The new dual-processor Power Macs are capable of a blazing 15 gigaflops, which is to say 15 billion floating point operations or calculations per second. The Original G4 processor ran at about 3.7 gigaflops.
The new 1-GHz chips will reportedly encode DVD video nearly 300% faster than their closest competitor, Intel's Pentium 4 running at 2 GHz. Apple claims its chips can compute faster than Intel's because of superior architecture rather than raw clock speed.
According to Apple, programs such as Adobe Photoshop will operate up to 72% faster with the new processor.
Lower-end Power Macs come with chips that run at 800 megahertz (MHz) and 933 MHz.
The new PowerMacs cost between $1,600 and $3,000.
Back to the beauty.
To the naysayers who doubted the new iMac would sell well, Apple is reporting record orders for the machine.
"We're getting a lot of PC users who are switching over," said Greg Joswiak, senior director of hardware marketing. "These are people looking for a more fulfilling experience."
Apple reports it has taken 150,000 preorders for the new iMac since its introduction last month at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco. The company started shipping iMacs the last several weeks.
The number of preordered machines so far exceeds the preorders received for the original iMac when it debuted in 1998.
With its funky bubble look, the original iMac was one of Apple's most popular product releases.
Starting at just under $1,300, the new iMac, with its white dome-like base, looks more like a desk lamp than a traditional computer.
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