Jobs unveils new iBooks, PowerBooks
Jobs said all the new hardware will be available immediately through retailers and Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) online store.
Keynote revelations at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba, Japan, included the following:
The iBook Special Edition, available for $1,799 in the same Graphite color scheme as the recently released iMac DV Special Edition and featuring 64MB of RAM and a 6GB hard drive, twice the amount in the original consumer notebook, as well as a 366MHz PowerPC G3 processor.
Apple also boosted the RAM and drive size in the $1,599 Tangerine and Blueberry iBooks, which run at 300MHz.
The latest generation of Apple's PowerBook G3, code-named Pismo. The new systems, available in 500MHz and 400MHz configurations and priced at $3,499 and $2,499, respectively, feature two built-in 400Mbps FireWire ports and offer up to 10 hours of battery life, the company said.
Each 5.7-pound system includes 1MB of Level 2 backside cache, a 100MHz system bus, a DVD-ROM drive, two Universal Serial Bus ports and Ultra ATA/66 hard drives with up to 18MB of storage.
Going wireless
The new PowerBooks join the rest of the current Mac line in offering support for AirPort, Apple's wireless networking technology.
A speed boost to the company's Power Mac G4 line that brings the professional desktop systems up to 500MHz, 450MHz and 400MHz while keeping prices of the models at $3,499, $2,499 and $1,599, respectively.
While Apple had originally announced the Power Mac G4 models at those speeds during September's Seybold Seminars show in San Francisco, the company in October cut the speeds by 50MHz across the board in response to "errata" that prevented the first generation of PowerPC G4 processors from reaching the 500MHz mark.
Jobs said Apple held the fourth-biggest market share for PCs in Japan at 7.8 percent in the final quarter of 1999, reflecting the popularity of its iBook and desktop iMac PCs. He gave no comparison with Apple's market share in previous quarters.
"We would like to see the share go even further. We know we have the strongest product line Apple has ever had," Jobs said.
Jobs also offered some other information tailored to the Japanese crowd. According to the CEO, 65 percent of Japanese iMac users are first-time customers. He cited fourth-quarter PC Data numbers that claim the iBook was the No. 1 selling consumer portable in Japan; 21 percent of iBook customers there are first-time buyers, and 15 percent are Windows converts. Apple formally introduced the "AirMac" to Japan. The wireless networking technology was renamed for the local market because "Airport" is trademarked by another company in Japan.
Another impressive demonstration
The keynote featured an impressive demonstration by Kensaku Sugino, IBM
Japan's marketing manager, of the Japanese version of ViaVoice Millenium
edition, IBM's voice-recognition software, and a showcase of Apple's
redesigned Japanese Web site. Like its U.S. counterpart, the new Apple Japan site features a tabbed interface. However, it lacks a local version of iTools, the suite of Mac OS
9-optimized services Jobs unveiled at January's Macworld Expo/San Francisco.
In another echo of the San Francisco event, Jobs concluded his presentation with a demo of Mac OS X and its Aqua interface. He mentioned that the third developer release of Mac OS X was just seeded to developers and that the new OS remains on track to ship this summer. All local versions (including Japanese) will ship on the same CD-ROM simultaneously, Jobs said, and the OS will come with five weights and faces of 17,000 kanji-character fonts.
Jason D. O'Grady of Go2Mac.com, Yuji Tai of Japan Apple Watch and Reuters contributed from Japan.