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Sci Tech
Why iMac may be the 'Apple of your eye'
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A new Apple PC is always a design engineer's delight. But the `iMac' unveiled this month, is being seen as the machine that will also inaugurate the next era of personal computing. Anand Parthasarathy examines the technological r easons for the excitement.
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The new iMac computer (inset) Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs at its unveiling during the MacWorld Expo.
THE BUILD-up to this month's MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, U.S., the annual gathering of the Apple Computer faithful, was tantalizing. ``This one is Big _ even by our standards!'' ran one blurb on the company's website. ``Count the days. Count the minutes. Count on being blown away,'' went another teaser.
Apple's charismatic CEO, Steve Jobs, the man who co-founded the company, in 1976, was booted out in 1986, only to hear a desperate call five years ago: `Come back please _ all is forgiven!' Since his Second Coming, Apple has resumed its creative role in the personal computer business, coming out with one innovative design after another and almost doubling its share of the market. What would he unveil this time? Something evolutionary in personal computing, some `cool' new accessory beyond webcameras, and videos?
As it happened, what the gathering of fiercely loyal fans saw when Jobs whipped off the covers on January 7, was both less and more than what the hype had promised. There were no breakthrough technologies, no new fancy gadgets. What Apple presented was a flat panel PC. Nothing revolutionary about that, surely!
But there was more to the new iMac than that. Occupying the smallest `footprint' of any contemporary desktop machine, the new iMac PC features a translucent, swiveling 15 inch flat panel screen, connected by a stainless steel strut, to a hemispherical dome-shaped base. Customers who look for the other half that comes with today's PCs _ the main processing and storage unit _ will look in vain: they have been squeezed into the 10 inch diameter base. All one can see from outside is the trap door that hides the DVD drive.
Standard attachments like the keyboard, optical mouse and speakers plug into the rear of the base.
The unorthodox engineering design is Apple's way of saying: The Cathode-Ray Tube or CRT (which is behind today's bulky monitor) is dead. The makers have also moved away from the current practice of packing the computing unit and the drives behind the flat panel screen. A flat panel should be really flat they feel, and the new model has been hailed in a cover story in Time magazine with the catch line: `Flat Out, Cool!' It goes on to call it the `most fabulous desktop machine that anyone, anywhere has ever seen... the quintessence of computational coolness.' While Apple computers, compared to Windows-based machines, form a small minority of PCs worldwide, estimated at less than 5 per cent, their designs have been ergonomic turning points in the PC's history.
The mouse as a pointing tool was pioneered by Apple in 1983, and the Apple Macintosh' that was launched a year later was the first PC that was substantially controlled by a mouse: the mass-selling IBM PC continued to be keyboard-driven for another decade till the Windows software appeared. This was a poor imitation of Apple's path breaking point-and-click menu-based graphical desktop format. PowerMac launched by Apple in 1992, was built to work with PowerPC _ a new generation 32-bit processor jointly developed with Motorola and IBM.
Today, the Apple remains the only PC family to work with the PowerPC family: its latest avatar is the PowerPC G4 _ and the only alternative to the Intel family and its equivalents from chip makers like AMD, that power the Windows-based machines.
The first generation iMac, launched by Apple four years ago, to encash the growing interest in Internet, broke away from the `beige coloured bondage' of PCs and was offered in a rainbow of candy-coloured plastic bodies, something that Compaq's IBM type PCs, and soon others, were to imitate.
But Apple's last radical design change _ the ice-cube shaped PowerMac G4 Cube of 2000 was a flop and has now been withdrawn. This contained at least one innovative design feature _ special ducts that obviated the need for cooling fans. But a fatal decision to grossly overprice the product, saw the buyer-base shrink alarmingly making the model unviable.
The new 2002 iMac range comes in three models _ the priciest at 1800 dollars, is built around an 800 MHz G4 processor and a compact 3.5 inch 60 GB hard disk, with 256 MB of memory with an industry first: a read-write DVD `SuperDrive' that allows users to burn their own video and audio DVDs. The cheaper models at 1500 dollars and 1300 dollars feature slightly slower processors ( 700 MHz), smaller hard drives (40 GB) and DVD player-CD burner and CD-only read-write drive respectively. All three come with Nvidia's GForce2 MX processors for 3-D video graphics. They should be available in India before mid 2002.
Steve Jobs the man credited with most of these radical design departures feels that the new iMac is at the vanguard of the Third Age of Personal Computing: after the first era of utility computing and a second spell tied to the Internet, the PC is now a `Digital Hub', the key device at the centre of a lifestyle that revolves around digital cameras, camcorders, MP3 players, DVD players, cellular phones and hand held computers.
In recognition of this role the iMac comes with no less than five 12-MBPS Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports and 2 superfast 400-MBPS Firewire ports, that allow such external devices to `plug and play' with the PC.
The iMac range will run Apple's new operating system the `Mac OS X' and already Microsoft's `Office' suite is now available in a Mac OS version. In another canny move aimed at persuading non-Mac users to change, the company has placed for free download at its site (www.apple.com/imac/photos.html) a new software called `iPhoto' that allows users with digital cameras, to download their pictures, to the, catalogue and display them as `sheets', size them for desktop printing and create photo albums ready for binding. Earlier Apple had already released other free software tools like iTunes and iMovies which have become popular for music and home movie editing.
Daring design innovations not withstanding, some industry watchers question how many buyers have the sort of money to splurge (Rs 70,000 - Rs 1 lakh equivalent) that the new iMacs ask. But going on past experience, Apple's loyal customers worldwide will upgrade _and the rest of us will wait till the IBM PC-makers pinch some of those design ideas and put them into more affordable Janatha machines.
One idea in the iMac that costs almost nothing, will have everyone saying: `Why did no one think of that before?' The Apple logo on the base of the machine doubles as a tiny mirror, providing a warning when the boss comes creeping behind you.
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