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"We believe that the Mac can become the digital hub of our new emerging digital lifestyle," managing music, video and other digital data flowing through the house and office, he said. Apple will begin selling the new OS X operating system on March 24 and will bundle the system with computers starting in July, Jobs said. "Mac OS X is laying the foundation for the next decade, decade and a half of our software efforts here," said Jobs. Apple stock jumped on the battery of product announcements, gaining 5/8, or 3.77 percent to $17-3/16 on Nasdaq and outpacing most other computer hardware companies. The share is up 16 percent this year after a devastating, four-month rout that took it from above $ 64 to just above $ 13. "The last several months of 2000 were particularly challenging for Apple and our industry," Jobs said. "We’ve decided to start 2001 with a bang." New products fill gaps Jobs said in December that Apple needed to increase the speed of chips and include hot peripherals like compact disc read-write drives, and he made a clear attempt on Tuesday to show that the company has delivered. The new notebook, which will be on sale by the end of January, fills in the top of the Powerbook line. It weighs in at just over five pounds, is one-inch thick, features a 15.2-inch screen, a built-in DVD player and is encased in titanium, "like the spy planes," joked Jobs. The new Power Mac G4, powered by a Motorola Inc. MOT.N chip, will run at speeds up to 733 MHz, still about half that of Intel’s top offering, but a big gain on Apple’s previous top speed of 500 MHz, which the company says is still enough to beat Intel. Jobs also used the Macworld stage to unveil a new, free application called "iTunes" that he said would make it easier for Apple users to download and write music CDs, organise a personal library of music and transfer music to digital MP3 players. "There is a music revolution happening now," said Jobs. "We’re late to this party and we’re about to do a leapfrog." The "Superdrive" that can read and write digital video discs (DVDs) will be standard on the 733 MHz Macs, he said. Some analysts have questioned whether Apple can stay the course on its own given the way recent product releases have fizzled and the way other personal computer makers have branched out into high-end servers and the Internet appliances. But Apple Vice-President for Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller told Reuters that Apple’s edge was partly due to taking a holistic approach to the computer. "We think about the whole thing, because we are really the last company that really makes the whole thing." Wit SoundView analyst Jason Wells, who lowered his expectations for Apple revenue below company guidance on Monday, said he had not seen anything sparkling enough to give the stock a real shot in the arm. "I think they did show some very exciting new applications, and the new Powerbook is a very cool machine. But that said, I don’t think it is going to help them attract many Wintel notebook users," he said, referring to machines running Microsoft Windows operating system on Intel Corp. INTC.O chips. "There wasn’t anything really surprising." Apple forecast a loss for the first-quarter of the 2001 fiscal year in early December, the first loss since Jobs returned in 1997 to the company he founded. The company cited the global economic slowdown, slower sales to schools and failures to offer hot products such as CD read-write drives as reasons for the worse-than-expected quarter at that time. — Reuters |
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Apple also showed off Macs with faster clock speeds, positioned to
compete better against Intel-architecture machines, and a drive that
will write digital video discs (DVDs) — a move designed to help Apple
jump ahead of competitors after the company failed to anticipate the
booming demand for write able compact discs.