It’s been years since Apple Computer Inc created one of the consumer products that made it a household name, but interim CEO Steve Jobs yesterday promised the company would make a return to that market with competitively priced products due in the fall. He declined to comment on the widely-reported Columbus home entertainment device that Apple is supposed to be working on, beyond describing it as anti-gravity, 300 miles a gallon. This led various commentators to wonder if Columbus isn’t just a fictitious device leaked to press to encourage people to not believe rumors they read in trade articles. A roadmap for Rhapsody, the much-misunderstood Apple-flavored progeny of the company’s $400m Next Computer Inc acquisition will be aired at its World Wide Developer’s conference in May. To flourish again Apple, at present a client-only company if the G3 server configurations are ignored, must expand beyond its core publishing and education markets. The latter is now the subject of a intensive marketing campaign by Microsoft Corp. At the Seybold publishing show in New York yesterday, Jobs gave a barnstorming demo of the G3 Macs outperforming the most powerful PC available – Compaq Computer’s 333MHz Pentium II which costs $4,342. Even the $2,169 266MHz PowerPC 750 G3 is more than twice as fast as the Compaq unit using the Byte Magazine PC benchmark. Jobs raced the anticipated 400MHz copper chip demo box, a new 300MHz G3 and the 266MHz desktop against the Compaq PC. Running Photoshop and Director – applications which are said to make heavy use of PowerPC’s supposed slow floating point unit – the computers finished in that order. Apple said it would make its ColorSync system software for matching color between different systems, monitors and applications cross-platform. It will have a Windows version ready by year-end when Adobe Systems Inc is to incorporate it into all of its applications, and Microsoft IE 4.1 for Mac due in April will also incorporate it. Apple is also about to ship its first dual-drive RAID products. They utilize the Conley SoftRAID software and will cost $1,070 more than the standard 4Gb drives available for G3s. In April Apple will ship a $300 FireWire card for importing images from digital video devices, its Manta flat panel TFT display with a 15.1 screen size equivalent to a 17 tube will cost $2,000 in May.
