Archive for June, 2003
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Reasons to celebrate…
Tuesday, June 24th, 2003
Proverbial Toasters
While I wasn’t able to actually acquire a toaster for the 100th visitor to my site, let me offer a proverbial “toaster” in the form of a Thank You. Though it won’t actually heat your bread as a toaster should, I hope it will warm your heart (I really just made that up on the fly…pretty gushy, huh?)
Apple’s new Toaster-like G5
I actually sat up for quite awhile last night watching the Apple keynote speech from everyone’s favorite mock-turleneck-wearer, Steve Jobs. The new specs on Panther look really exciting. I missed the cost of the upgrade because my feed kept stalling, but I did catch a lot of it’s better features which included, better native PDF support, a new pixel-rendering technology that renders video with astounding quality, and very cool new applications such as iChatAV (which is available in it’s beta form right now), and a Font Management tool called Font Book, a must for people like me with humpteen thousand fonts that I never think to use because I already have too many fonts in my fonts folder and don’t have the money at present to buy Font Reserve or Suitcase (that was a mouthful). Oh, and Apple also decided to make a webcam called iSight, a fantastic little webcam that I’m grabbing just as soon as I can.
While Panther and iSight are cool, however, the new G5 is infinitely cooler. Here you can watch the new intro video to this amazing machine, which is apparently running up to TWO TIMES faster than the previous G4 machine. I just find that staggering. The 2Ghz chip is just as fast as a 3Ghz Intel chip, and the computer is built on a 64-bit platform, where PC’s still run on 32 (it’s like the difference between the original Playstation and the Dreamcast), and what really blew me away is that is has slots for 8 GIGABYTES OF RAM, which is just insane.
Jonathan Ive has once again designed a beautiful and incredibly functional box, which boasts four “temperate zones” which cool individual parts of the computer, making it even quieter than the previous G4’s. The mesh casing in front and back is minimal, but really beautiful in an industrial kind of way. And, once again, it looks like it belongs in a science fiction movie rather than on my desk.
I was amazed to find, too, that this new machine (the TOP OF THE LINE MACHINE, no less) only costs $3,000. That’s cheaper than the top of the line G4 from a few months ago. It really looks like Apple is trying to make all of this a lot more accessible (though it still falls eons outside of my budget range).
I’m floored once again. I really didn’t think Apple could consistently innovate like this, but they keep proving to be even more creative than I’d ever imagined.
Way to go, Steeeeeeve!
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