 The Macworld Expo kicked off to the tunes of Buddy Holly as we awaited Steve Jobs' keynote address. Needless to say, there were a few surprises that we did not expect. The unveiling of Quicktime TV was quite a pleasant surprise (when it finally began to work smoothly), as was Bugie's Halo, though all the buzz was about the new iBook.
The new consumer portable, scheduled for release in September, is different in ways than many people had expected. The major criticism heard about the show floor was the $1599 price tag being about $200-$300 too high for a consumer product.
All in all, the iBook does offer a number of good features, most especially the AirPort card, which allows wireless networking capabilities. A single base station with an 11 megabit tranfer rate can connect up to 10 iBooks to an Ethernet network or a modem.
The iBook will be available in Tangerine and Blueberry, below is a list of specs:
- 300mhz G3
- 12.1in TFT screen
- 4MB VRAM
- ATI RAGE
- 24x built in CD-ROM
- 32 MB RAM
- 3.2 GB Hard Drive
- 56k Modem
- 10/100 Base-T Ethernet
- USB port
- Full-sized Keyboard
- 6 hour battery life
The QuicktimeTV finally showed what streaming Quicktime is all about. Jobs, in his keynote, stated that Apple's goalwith Quicktime is to provide the best quality in video formating and transfer. The demonstration worked quite well over the high-speed connection Jobs was using, though many modem users reportively have difficulty recieving non-corrupted signals.
Finally, Apple announced that it will be issuing an OS 9, which will be a $99 upgrade this fall. Although it promises 50 new features, Jobs demonstrated only one of them: the new Sherlock. Sherklock II combines some requested features, such as being able to group search sites by categories. However, Sherlock's most exciting new feature is context-sensitive price searching on the internet. You will be able to bargain-hunt on the web by typing in the title of your favorite game and see who is charging the lowest price for it. . . including the ability to search eBay auctions.
[Price]
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