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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan Fleuris who wrote (28438)	7/19/2000 2:15:47 PM
From: FruJu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 213176

>Now there a curious situation in which the higher >priced cube offers no speed advantage over the >standard G4 (did I miss something?). The low end cube is 450MHz ($1799), the low end tower is 400MHz ($1599). However, the tower has Gigabit Ethernet as of today, while the cube sounds as though it only has 100Mb/s. The cube has no expandability [other than memory, hard disk and maybe graphics card], while the tower has multiple hard drive bays, can have a ZIP disk as well, 3 PCI slots. I don't see any reason why I would buy the low end cube over the tower - do you? The problem I see is that once again, Apple has been screwed over by Motorola at the MHz end of things. What should have happened is that the Cube should have been introduced with 500MHz at $1799. The 400MHz tower should have been dropped, and the two high end towers should have been 500MHz and 600MHz dual G4s. Now that would have made more sense. I suspect that what we saw today were definitely not the MHz and price points which Apple had originally planned when they started designing this cube - thanks to Motorola.

To: Dan Fleuris who wrote (28438)	7/19/2000 9:46:20 PM
From: Zen Dollar Round	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213176

As for Macworld, I was impressed that Apple announced the multiprocessor G4s, especially at the same price points as the previous single-processor Macs. I really didn't expect to see multiprocessor Macs until Seybold at the earliest, more likely Macworld SF in January. I think Motorola forced Apple's hand on this one by being so slow with updates to the G4. Apple had to do something to bring the magic back. A simple speed bumped G4 to 600Mhz would have been a real yawner. I'm also curious about the Mac Cube and who Apple thinks will buy it. If Apple had discontinued the low end G4 tower it would make sense, but why would someone pay $200 more for a far less expandable machine with a slightly faster processor? Oh yeah, and no fan so it's quieter. This one's a real head scratcher. Perhaps that's why it will only be available through the Apple Store -- to those people who prefer form over function and enjoy paying sales tax no matter what state they live in. It certainly looks cool though. :) The new mouse and keyboard look to be good. I'm sure everyone who saw the keynote in person liked getting one for free, a fact I haven't seen any Mac news site mention so far (they handed one out to everyone in attendance after the keynote with a ticket under everyone's seat). Other items most Mac news sites didn't mention or got wrong: 1. Looks as though the number of iMac colors has been pared down considerably, with the $799 iMac only in Indigo, and the $999 iMac DV coming in Indigo and Ruby now. The $1299 iMac DV+ adds Sage (dark green) to those two, and the DV SE adds Snow to the only previous choice for that model, Graphite. Probably a good decision overall, I doubt the Tangerine and Lime iMacs were hot sellers. 2. The $999 iMac DV no longer has a DVD-ROM drive, it's CD only. You still need to pay at least $1299 for a Mac with a DVD drive. 3. The 500Mhz multiprocessor Power Mac competing against the 1Ghz Pentium III rendered a Photoshop scene in under half the time of the Intel box. Any others? I find that watching the streaming keynote is always beneficial since the Mac sites seldom catch everything. It's especially true this time since there were so many new things introduced. Oh, one last thing. According to Inside Mac Games, Steve Jobs was not amused by ATI's preannouncement that new Mac models would be introduced at Macworld with the new Radeon graphics card. So angered was he that he ordered all references to the Radeon pulled from the keynote and cancelled a planned segment from an ATI exec about the new cards. One doesn't upset Steve Jobs and not pay dearly for it, apparently. The full details of that are here: insidemacgames.com

To: Dan Fleuris who wrote (28438)	7/19/2000 10:14:11 PM
From: Zen Dollar Round	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213176

One last thing, I think you're right about OS X and it's certainly disappointing Apple couldn't release the public beta at the show. An "early September" release just isn't long enough for a full beta cycle to make it out by January 2001. Jobs himself seemed to be waffling on the exact time frame by saying only "early 2001" for the 1.0 release. To me that means it could be as late as the end of March 2001. At least we're getting close, and Apple will already have a good many multiprocessor Power Mac users ready to take full advantage of the new OS. After all, OS X is now more than 2 1/2 years overdue from the initial timeline we all saw when Apple bought NeXT and its CEO, back when it was still known as Rhapsody. Mac users are growing restless, and no amount of new, fast iron can overome the limitations of an old, tired Mac OS. We need OS X yesterday!