Oohs and ahhs wafted from the audience when Steve Jobs, delivering his keynote speech at the MacWorld show last week, showed off what may have been the most noteworthy feature in Apple Computer Inc.’s newest computer. Only in the computer business would something so useful–and so obvious–be revolutionary.
The Door opens like a drawbridge from the side of the latest model of the Power Macintosh G3, introduced Tuesday. It exposes the elegantly configured innards, bringing much-needed ease to adding internal disk drives, memory and expansion cards that may match the famous Mac ease of use.
Your taste may vary, but to me the new G3s are stylish, with a case that mocks the dullness of most “Wintel” PCs. They’re definitely fast, with processor speeds up to 400 megahertz. They’re massively expandable, with room for lots of fast memory, hard disk space and peripheral devices communicating with the computer and each other at high speeds. They come with fast graphics performance for games and for everyday use by artists, designers and other such professionals.
Maybe I’m still trapped in Jobs’ patented “reality distortion field,” but for the first time in ages I have a case of techno-lust. When I replace the Mac that I currently use for certain tasks, I’ll be extremely tempted to make it one of the new G3s. They will range in price from $1,600 to $3,000 without monitors–more than reasonable if you need or want this kind of performance.
Jobs, master showman and Apple’s perpetually interim chief executive officer, had more to offer at his keynote than just the latest desktop computers. His state of the Mac address ranged from the relatively trivial–the newest iMac will come in five colors, with slightly more power and slightly lower cost–to the more technical: the first offering of MacOS X, a truly modern operating system that will appear first in G3 “server” models, machines that dish out data, files, applications and more to other computers. There were also some new monitors, including a 21-incher that professional artists will crave. He didn’t talk about an upcoming line of consumer notebook computers, a big hole in the current product line.
But the progress report from the Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s iCEO, as he dubbed himself, was heartening. It showed that a great deal of energy and innovation remain in the Apple ranks.
And while his keynote drew the usual crowd of enraptured fans, I also sensed a higher energy and optimism on the show floor than I recall from past years. The site was buzzing.
Macolytes thronged to the booth run by Connectix Corp., which makes the indispensable Virtual PC software that lets you run Windows applications on the Mac. They wanted to see, close-up, the latest software from this creative company: a $49 product that will let users run Sony PlayStation games on a Mac. I hope Sony is smart enough to applaud this development, which reinforces the appeal of its game player, and not try to thwart it.