SAN FRANCISCO -- With characterisitic panache, Steve Jobs introduced a new line of Macs he described as the first desktop supercomputers.
During a packed keynote at Tuesday's Seybold conference here, Apple's interim CEO unveiled a new line of G4 Power Macs for a crowd of enthusiastic design and publishing professionals.
"We've got some fun news for you here today," he teasingly said before unveiling the new machine.
Sporting a new silver and "graphite" grey case, the Power Mac G4 is the first personal computer built around Motorola's new G4 Power PC chip, which features a new processing unit Apple is calling the Velocity Engine, previously known as AltiVec.
Capable of operating at up to one Gigaflop, or one billion floating point operations per second, the new Macs can't be exported to countries like China, Iraq, or North Korea because they are classified by the United States as weapons, Jobs told the audience.
"This thing is incredible," Jobs said. "It's the first supercomputer on a chip.... We think it's going to set the industry on fire."
The G4 chip is nearly three times faster than the fastest Pentium III, Jobs said, quoting performance tests Apple engineers found on Intel's Web site.
Proceeding to demonstrate the performance difference, Jobs and Phil Schiller, Apple's vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, had fun performing a series of bake-offs that pitted a G4 against a 600MHz Pentium III machine, "the fastest Pentium money can buy," Jobs said.
"One of the design goals for this machine was to make it the ultimate Photoshop machine," Jobs said, before showing the 500-MHz G4 create an image in Photoshop at least twice as fast as the 600-MHz Pentium III machine.
"They are the most powerful PC ever brought to market," he said. "We're leaving the century on a high."
The machines come in three basic models: a 400-MHz version for US$1,599, now available; a 450-MHz machine for $2,499, available in mid-September; and a 500-MHz version, priced at $3,495, available at the end of September.
The G4 features a redesigned motherboard with faster memory access and twice the data throughput of previous models, Jobs said.
The machines will also feature Intel's new Advanced Graphics Port, which speeds graphics processing, as well as fast, roomy hard drives and built-in FireWire. The high-end machine will support Apple's AirPort wireless networking.
"They're phenomenal machines," said John Warnock, chairman and CEO of Adobe, who joined Jobs onstage. "Of all the machines we've seen, this is the fastest machine that runs our applications."
In an attempt to describe how fast the G4 chip is, Jobs called on Dr. Richard Crandall, a research scientist, who said the chip performs a single operation in the same time light travels one foot.
"When you're running a desktop supercomputer," he said. "In the time it takes to do one operation, the light leaving the monitor has not reached your face."
In a now familiar trick, Jobs ended the keynote with a surprise "One more thing..." product unveiling.
From the back of the stage, Jobs pulled out Apple's new Cinema Display, a 22-inch LCD flat-panel monitor that Jobs said is the largest on the market.
Capable of displaying a full 11-by-17-inch page, with extra room for application toolbars, the screen is twice as bright as a conventional CRT monitor, with twice the contrast ratio and no screen flicker, Jobs said.
The display will be available in October for $3,999 but will only be sold as part of a package that includes a high-end G4, Jobs said.
"I'm still drooling," said Lou Mazzucchelli, an analyst with Gerard Klauer Mattison & Co. of New York, after the presentation. "They're out of the park."
Mazzuccelli said he couldn't imagine anyone in the audience who wouldn't want one.
"It's very exciting," he said. "It raises the bar on the competition."
"Gigaflop performance is a big deal," he added. "And to be able to put that in a classroom is phenomenal."
"It's what we've been waiting for in the publishing industry," said Dan Lorenzini, the prepress manager at Doubleday Direct. "They are pulling so far ahead of the rest of industry right now, it's great."
"We're planning on replacing a lot of machines," he said. "Whatever our budget can handle."
