Art meets high tech - in this PC

Apple's Macintosh may have been overwhelmed in the PC marketplace by Windows-Intel machines. But it remains the favoured platform of the graphics arts community. ANAND PARTHASARATHY looks at its latest model, just released the Power Mac G4 `Cube' - which as always breaks the mould of contemporary computer design.

HIS NORMAL office attire is a pair of shorts, a black polo necked shirt - and sandals. In New York, on July 19, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Computers - the man who returned three years ago to turn around the company which he co-founded 25 years earlier - made a small concession to the occasion and substituted a pair of jeans for the shorts.

Before a screaming audience of 4000, at `MacWorld' the twice- yearly gathering of Apple's fiercely faithful fans, Jobs whipped the covers off the latest 'avatar' of Apple's personal computer - the machine that launched the microcomputer era and set standards for user friendliness, that competitors took decades to even imitate.

In the marketplace, Apple's Macintosh machines - or `Macs' - were soon overwhelmed by the generic model known as the IBM PC - what is today called the Wintel (`Windows' software and Intel processor-based) computer. Less than 10 Macs are sold to every 90 Wintels, worldwide; but that is a matter of unconcern to the Mac's loyal user base. They pity,rather than envy, the `Wintel wallahs'. And every time the Mac has evolved - from the original 1984 Macintosh; the shortlived Quadra of early 1990s; the PowerMac based on the Power PC in 1994; to the innovative, Internet-ready iMac that came in 1998 - its fans have rallied, to support the new models, by trading in their old machines.

Did Steve have something new up his rolled-up sleeve this year? He did not disappoint: The new machine, was awkwardly named the Power Macintosh G4 `Cube' - and it looked like no computer ever seen before: a clear plastic cube (well, almost, it stands about 25 cm tall and 19 cms square), with rounded edges and no protruding buttons or controls of any kind.

The machine sensed your finger when you pressed a spot marked ``on''. The Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) popped up from the top, like a slice of bread from a toaster. The internal electronics form part of another cube within. Click open a special one-button lock and you can lift out the inner cube, by a handle which pops up - much like you lift out the inner boxes from a tiffin carrier.

The power cable and the video cables which connect to the display, have been combined into one cord which comes off the bottom. Lifting out the core, enables one to easily add additional memory or install new features, like a wireless remote. The antennas which provide the PC with ``remote'' operation are stuck to the sides of the cube - but you could mistake their ceramic ridges for a part of the styling.

The entire thing weighs 6.6 kg and occupies one fourth of the space of earlier Macs and other conventional desktop PCs. It is also silent: there is no fan, the Cube uses cannily designed convectional cooling.

The new peripherals, seem, like the Cube itself, to belong in a museum of modern art, rather than on a professional's desktop. The loudspeakers look like a pair of crystal half-coconuts. The standard Apple mouse was always too small, an ergonomically lousy design that was dubbed by hassled users, a ``hockey puck'' (as in Ice Hockey).

The new Apple Pro Mouse is a large translucent bubble that does not have multiple click buttons or moving parts like the ball. The entire housing depresses to click and uses optical tracking to achieve precision pointing. It works on practically any surface. You can throw away that mouse pad. The redesigned keyboards includes volume and mute controls - as well as an eject button for the computer's DVDs.

The Cube is offered with a choice of displays - from a 15 inch flat panel LCD; a 17 inch ``studio'' CRT display to a jumbo 22 inch (diagonal) Cinema display, of 1600 by 1024 pixels, claimed to be the largest flat panel LCD monitor for PCs today. ``We want Apple to stand at the intersection of Art and Technology'' says Jobs - and the Cube certainly looks it.

Within the see-through scratch-proof polymer walls, the heart of the Cube is the same Power PC G4 processor that powered the iMac - the chip jointly developed by Apple, Motorola and IBM but used substantially only by Apple. Clock speed-wise, the G4 may seem like a slouch - at 450 MHz. But a built-in ``Velocity Engine'' with 162 single instructions, allows the machine to achieve near- supercomputer performance: around 3 gigaflops. The standard G4 Cube comes with a 450 Mhz processor, 64 MB of memory, (expandable to 1.5 GB), 20 GB of hard disk storage, a DVD drive, a 56 K modem, 2 USB ports, a ``FireWire'' port (a new standard to connect to handycams) and a built in Ethernet port for networking.

It will become available in the US this week at a list price of $1799. The model with a 500 MHz processor, 30 GB hard disk and 128 MB of RAM, will cost $2299. Adding a 15 inch flat panel display will cost about $1000 extra.

For those who spend this sort of money, Apple has unveiled new software that is likely to appeal to its core clientele in the media and arts arena: ``iMovie 2'' is the newest version of its desktop video editing software that allows even ``dummies'' to create reasonable movies using a host of audio and video editing tools, hitherto the preserve of high end workstation operators.

Indeed this is in the long tradition of past Apple software developments: simple spreadsheets that allowed home users to handle accounts with professionalism; desk top publishing software that transformed the book and magazine publishing business.... To coincide with the launch of the Cube, Microsoft announced early release of a special ``Office 2001'' suite tailored for Mac platforms, with some features not available in Windows/Office 2000 - like an email scheduler and the facility to export Powerpoint presentations as a Quicktime movie.

Analysts sizing up the facets of the Cube, have pointed to a few down sides, which are summarised in one reviewer's succinct summation: the Cube is ``upgrade challenged'' - that is, there are no PCI type slots for adding your own cards. The video card cannot be disabled - which means you cannot install your own favourite games or 3-D cards. The extremely compact design means that a few compromises have had to be made when it comes to providing user-upgradeable features.

And to consumers used to the regular upping of Wintel processor clock speeds - now over 1 GHz - the Power Mac's 500 MHz may seem like a case of flogging a bullock cart onto an express highway. ``No way'' says Apple - and to prove it they have also launched new versions of conventional (ie non cuboid) PowerMacs with dual G4 processors: two 450 or 500 MHz processors working in tandem.

This shares heavy graphical chores - and applications like Adobe Photoshop were demonstrated at MacWorld, tackling jobs in half the time that they would take on the fastest Wintel machines. It does not take a brilliant mind to see that Apple plans to stick with the slower PowerPC processors and take on the competition by throwing in ``2 chips for the price of 1''.

Will the gamble pay off? Will Apple reinvent itself for the new millennium, as a maker of leading edge computing platforms that both, look good and act great? The market is a harsh place and unlike the iMacs of two years ago, Apple's cubical lineup is not aggressively priced. It remains to be seen whether customers are willing to pay an enhanced price for the many innovative features.

But if they forget such mundane matters as money for a few brief seconds and feast their eyes on the tantalizing Cube, they may well sense a mystical magic at work - a magic that a poet once expressed far more elegantly when he said: ``A Thing of Beauty is a joy forever''

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