Steve Jobs kicked off what looked like the most promising MacWorld event for years in San Francisco yesterday with four major announcements, including a complete revamp of the Power Macintosh G3 minitower line. Jobs also revealed the first release of MacOS X for the server, new pricing and colors for the iMac line, and a further push into the games market (see related stories). The new G3s are said to be the first to use copper- based PowerPC processors running at 300, 350 and 400MHz, supporting up to 1Gb DRAM. Jobs said the processors were being supplied by both Motorola Inc and IBM Corp, though only the IBM processors are currently copper-enabled. All the new G3s will include a bundled-in Rage 128 graphics accelerator from Canadian chip maker ATI Technologies Inc, the first systems on the market to use the chip. The old G3s used the previous generation Rage Pro chip. Jobs claimed that the bundle put the Macintosh around 20% faster than the PC in terms of graphics performance, as PCs typically use an add-in Voodoo 2 card costing around $200. 3Dfx Interactive Inc’s 128-bit Voodoo 3 part is not expected on the market until the second quarter of next year. For software support, Apple announced that it had gone to Silicon Graphics Inc to license the OpenGL graphics libraries, and would integrate them within future versions of MacOS, making OpenGL the standard set of graphics libraries for Macintosh developers. The integration will start with the next release of MacOS 8 and the first release of Mac OS X. Apple has added plenty of expansion into the new G3s, offering up to 1Gb of memory and 100Gb of storage inside the enclosure, using three 36Gb drives from IBM Corp. There are four slots, three of them 64-bit PCI, and 100baseT Ethernet, USB and Firewire ports and support for Gigabit Ethernet. Jobs claimed there are over 80 USB devices shipping now, and that the number would have increased to 100 by March. Around 4 million digital cameras already on the market support Firewire. Apple has worked hard on the design of the new G3s, which are made out of translucent blue polycarbonate plastic, have handles for easy carrying and a door which opens to give full access to the components inside. There are also three new displays, a 21-inch color calibrated Trinitron display for $1,499, 17-inch for $499 and 15-inch for $1,099. Prices start at $1,599 for the minitower – the same price as the old G3 desktops – and rise up to $2,999 for fully configured versions. Jobs demonstrated the systems running up against fully configured Compaq systems using 450MHz Pentium chips, claiming performance advantages of around 20%.
