is the Macintosh world’s largest regular expo and always takes place in January in San Francisco, providing an excellent showcase for new products. This month’s show was no exception and Steve Jobs used his keynote speech to announce a terrific new range of Power Mac G3s. From a financial and user as well as market confidence point of view, Apple is BACK! Jobs announced that the next quarter will be profitable, the fifth profitable quarter in a row. Apple have sold 1.6 million G3s in a year and an astounding 800,000 iMacs since launch 5 months ago. (Some of these were even in South Africa). Mac OS 8.5 has sold upwards of a million units in retail.
Hundreds of new products were launched, proving that the Mac is still well supported in the developer community. Even the dreaded Microsoft have the Office suite of programs in a newer version than on Windows and a Macintosh programming division second in size only to Apple itself.
With the ability to run Windows (see article on page 3) and Byte specmarks twice those of the fastest Pentium there is really no reason to buy a PC. What’s that? Price I hear you say? Well if that argument held water you would only see 1.2 litre Ford Escorts on the roads and no BMWs and Mercs, wouldn’t you?
Tell your friends - better yet show them - the Mac is Back!
Of course the big news at the expo is the new range of G3 computers, but first a quick mention of the iMac which is now 33Mhz faster, at 266Mhz, and also available in five different colours for those choosy users who have a fixed colour scheme in their home or office. The new G3s are somewhat different from all previous Macs in that they are no longer the ubiquitous Apple Platinum but now the same colour as the (original) iMac and they use a similar motherboard. Like the iMac, it has no stiffy drive and no SCSI port but both can be added, a stiffy drive will cost around R1,200 and a PCI SCSI card will probably be about R700. These new PowerMacs are a good deal quicker too with 300, 350 and 400Mhz options and the bus speed now runs at 100Mhz (up from 66Mhz). Video too is quicker using the the ultra-fast Rage 128 chip as standard. Ethernet at 100BaseT is built-in as well as FireWire which replaces SCSI as the standard for data transfer and it's a lot quicker - a speedy 400Mbps in fact. FireWire uses much thinner cable than SCSI and can be up to 4 metres in length - SCSI cables and termination have always been a huge pain, so we for one won’t be sorry to see it go.
Standard memory is 64Mb, upgradeable to a massive 1Gb, so Photoshop users will be very pleased and the Internal Drives are now 6Gb in size except for the 400Mhz model which has 9Gb storage capacity.
Each model comes with the standard three extra drive bays and as 36Gb drives will soon be available you can have an astonishing 100Gb of internal storage!
One small problem that niggled some users was the miserly three PCI slots in G3s. These machines now have an additional slot and while
at first glance this may sound like an improvement, that extra slot is taken up by the fast graphics card. In fact another slot will almost certainly have to house a SCSI card so the gain is more than negated.
Another complaint has been the lack of DVD drive for multimedia people. A 350Mhz model ships with one installed and they will soon also be available as an add-on purchase in both internal and external formats.If you want your monitor to match your Mac you will need to buy one of the new ones from Apple. Your choice is between a 17" DiamondTron, a 21" Trinitron and an LCD display. The 21" unit has ultra-fine resolution (1600 x 1200 at 85Hz), a four-port USB hub and a unique tilt-and-swivel stand that allows you to slide a keyboard underneath for extra desktop space. The Mac also supports VGA monitors so any standard PC monitor will work without the need for an adaptor.
The differences are shown on the individual specs.
* MiniTower case with 4 PCI slots
* Mac OS 8.5
* RAGE 128 graphics card
* 16 MB graphics memory
* 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet
* Two 400 Mbps FireWire ports
* Two 12 Mbps Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports
* One Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) port
* 15-pin VGA connector and Mac-to-VGA adapter
* Minijacks for 16-bit stereo audio input/output.
* Keyboard and Mouse
Power Macintosh G3 400 MHz
This is the highest performance, no compromise system, fastest G3 Processor, supplied with large RAM and large SCSI drive, it’s perfect for DTP and design professionals who want to run the most powerful image-editing packages.
* G3 400 MHz G3/1MB L2 cache
* 128 MB SDRAM
* 9 GB Ultra2 SCSI drive and Ultra2 SCSI PCI card
* CD-ROM drive
Power Macintosh G3 350MHz
This configuration is designed to be a very high performance system with a fast G3 Processor and supplied with large RAM, large fast ATA drive and built in ZIP. This is designed as a general "workhorse", for DTP and all markets.
* G3 350MHz G3/1MB L2 cache
* 128 MB SDRAM
* 12 GB Ultra ATA drive
* Zip drive
* CD-ROM drive
Power Macintosh G3 350MHz (DVD)
Although this is a high performance system again with a fast G3 Processor it has a keen price point. With 64 MB RAM, a fast ATA drive and a DVD ROM drive and DVD MPEG2 (playback) to provide playback DVD video titles, including Region 2 support. This is ideal for home and design users looking for a machine that can handle the latest in graphics-intensive games, DVD Video and Internet applications.
* G3 350MHz G3/1MB L2 cache
* 64 MB SDRAM
* 6 GB Ultra ATA drive
* DVD-ROM drive/DVD-Video
Power Macintosh G3 300MHz
The entry level for the new range is very aggressively priced and aimed at the more price sensitive markets and education with this fast 300MHz system having all the basic features of the other configurations.
* G3 300MHz G3/512K L2 cache
* 64 MB SDRAM
* 6 GB Ultra ATA drive
* CD-ROM drive