June 24, 2003
Apple moves into the future, at least a little.
MacCentral offers a
nice roundup of news from
Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference.
Apple on Monday passed its Intel-based competition in processor power with the release of the much-anticipated Power Mac G5 desktop computer. The company also used the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) to show the advanced features of Panther, the next major revision to Mac OS X Apple will release later this year.
Apple's new G5-based personal computer not only gets a new chip, but also gets a complete overhaul of the architecture of the machine. Billed as "the world's fastest personal computer," the G5 features a 64-bit processor and 1GHz front-side bus, can address up to 8GB of memory and features processor speeds of up to 2GHz.
"From the very beginning we said that when we come out with the next generation processor we want to upgrade the whole architecture," Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, told MacCentral.
This actually sounds interesting, at least from the technological perspective. But not from the marketing one. Unfortunately Apple, all by itself, is simply not capable of producing enough machines fast enough to create an installed base large enough to develop for. At least that's my feeling, and has been since Jobs pulled the plug on other manufacturers when he came back in the late 90s. But they sure do sound great. And so does Panther.
I note however, that their stock is up around 50% over the last few months. I think though that that's from their new music center, which has been a bit hit, there being a lot more music fans than there are Mac fans. The stock price actually declined a little after yesterday's announcements.
