By Siobhan Kennedy
To a crowd of cheering Mac devotees, Apple Computer Inc’s CEO Steve Jobs yesterday lifted the lid on the company’s long anticipated consumer notebook, the iBook, a swanky, colorful take off of its popular desktop product which Jobs dubbed an iMac to go. Speaking at the keynote on the first day of MacWorld Expo in New York, Jobs described the new laptop as the last piece of Apple’s product puzzle, fulfilling the company’s strategy to put our eight teams on four great products; a desktop and a notebook in both the consumer and professional marketplaces. Already the company has delivered its professional offerings, the PowerMacintosh G3 desktop and PowerBook portable and last year, Jobs unveiled the iMac consumer PC.
The $1,599 iBook, available in September this year, is the fourth and final offering, prompting questions about what markets Apple might want to break into next. There’s been much talk of the company launching a handheld device, but so far Apple has remained characteristically tightlipped on that front.
Instead, the tangerine and blueberry colored iBooks took center stage Wednesday. There’s been a lot of speculation, a lot of rumors and I get to end it today, Jobs told the packed audience. We went to customers and said precisely what is it that you want? We added it all up and decided what they wanted was an iMac to go…and we’ve done that..I hope.
Running through what seemed a pretty impressive set of features for the price, Jobs said the iBook comes with a 12.1 inch TFT SVGA color screen with 800 x 600 dpi resolution; a 300MHz chip; 4MB video card; 24 speed CD Rom; 32MB of synchronous DRAM memory (expandable to 160MB); a 3.2GB hard drive. And on the connectivity side, it includes a built-in 56K modem and 10/100 Base-T Ethernet networking plus up to six hours battery life. One downside is the weight; it’s certainly not the lightest laptop around, but on the plus side, Apple does include a pull out handle which lets you carry the laptop round like a case.
But the feature Jobs got most excited about was the iBook’s built-in wireless networking capabilities, aptly named AirPort, and everywhere you looked at the trade show were advertising banners bearing the slogan Think Wireless plastered across them. He said that the company had been working with Lucent Technologies Inc for the last eighteen months to incorporate its WaveLan technology into the new laptop. As well as the AirPort wireless adapter card, which fits into a neat slot underneath the iBook’s keyboard, users have to purchase a mini base station, designed in the same sleek translucent style. The wireless technology is based on the IEEE’s new 802.11 wireless networking standard, which transmits data at 11Mbps, slightly faster than today’s Ethernet standard which runs at 10Mbps. Although being able to surf the internet without wires is certainly attractive, the iBook won’t let you roam very far (up to 150ft away from the base station) and there’s a chance the technology might break up if the iBook’s adapter card doesn’t have a clear line of sight to a base station. To that end, Apple is pitching the technology at home and educational users, where base stations can be strategically placed. But even then, the only wireless part of the equation is between the laptop and the base station. To make it onto the internet at large, the base station has to be linked to a modem – the device will plug into a standard phone line, a 56K modem or a cable connection. One base station can connect up to 10 users. The card costs $99 and the base station $299.
Also during the keynote, Jobs gave a sneak preview of Apple’s upcoming Mac OS version 9, which is due for release in October. The new OS features some 50 new features, Jobs said, although he highlighted only one, Sherlock 2, Apple’s internet searching tool which has been updated to include e-commerce functionality. The first version let users key in a search term, in natural language, and the software would go out and search the internet, using all the standard search engines, and deliver the results according to their relevance. Release 2.0 adds to that by allowing users to create different types of searches, for example, find anything relating to the Apollo mission, but only on news sites, as well as allowing the results to be sorted in various ways; by date the article was written, by site and so on. In addition, when searching on commerce sites, Sherlock will allow users to click straight into the site and purchase the goods directly.
Jobs also announced a partnership with Akamai to deliver the QuickTime TV network, a service that combines Apple’s existing QuickTime 4.0 player (the TV desktop receiver) with its QuickTime streaming server (the TV station) and Akamai’s server network of over 900 geographically dispersed servers in over 15 countries. While Apple could offer TV and web streaming before, the quality was never very good, Jobs said, but through the alliance with Akamai, the signal gets to one of the 900 servers and gets buffered, to improve the quality, before being finally downloaded to the recipients’ desktops. As well as offering a host of channels now, including BBC World, Bloomberg TV, NPR and Fox News, Jobs yesterday also announced new partnerships with ABC News, ESPN, Rolling Stone, VH1 and Disney.
In addition, IBM Corp said it will offer its ViaVoice voice recognition technology on the Macintosh platform by the end of the year. In a demonstration, IBM showed how the software allows users to speak directly into the PC and see the words appearing on screen almost in real time and with very few inaccuracies.
