Apple adopts big screen for iMac

Apple is bringing the big screen to its all-in-one iMac desktop.

The company on Tuesday revealed a new iMac with a 20-inch display and also updated its Power Mac G5 desktop line with a dual 1.8GHz processor model. The new desktops should increase the appeal of the iMac for multimedia tasks and give Power Mac customers more options, Apple said in statements.

The iMac's display, which offers a resolution of up to 1,680 by 1,050 pixels, will allow customers to view two documents side by side and also grant more real estate for tasks such as video editing, Apple said.

The 20-inch iMac comes with a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 256MB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, Nvidia GeForce FX Ultra 5200 graphics chip and Apple's SuperDrive DVD recorder/CD burner. It is available now for $2,199, Apple said.

The 20-inch iMac follows updated 15-inch and 17-inch iMacs, which came out in September. The 17-inch iMac, which has the same hardware as the 20-inch model, costs $1,799, Apple said.

Meanwhile, the dual 1.8GHz Power Mac G5, also available now, sells for $2,499, or $500 less than Apple's dual 2GHz machine, the company said.

The new machine comes with a pair of IBM PowerPC 970 chips running at 1.8GHz, along with 512MB of RAM; a 160GB hard drive; an Nvidia GeForce FX Ultra 5200 chip; and the SuperDrive. Each of its processors sports a 900MHz front-side bus, Apple said. The speed of the front-side bus basically measures how quickly data can be delivered to a processor.

With the introduction of the dual 1.8GHz machine, Apple also shuffled its PowerMac G5 lineup. The new, dual-processor machine replaces a single-processor 1.8GHz Power Mac G5, but costs only $100 more.

Apple also lowered the price of its remaining, single-processor Power Mac G5 model--configured with a 1.6GHz PowerPC chip, 256MB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive and the SuperDrive--to $1,799. It had been $1,999.

"Our customers told us loud and clear that they love dual processors, so now two of the three Power Mac G5 models feature lightning-fast dual processors," Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple, said in a statement.

Also on Tuesday, Apple released software updates that bring its Final Cut Pro 4, Shake 3 and DVD Studio Pro 2 applications up-to-speed on Power Mac G5 desktops running Mac OS X version 10.3. Customers who currently have the applications can download the updates--Final Cut Pro 4.1, Shake 3.0.1 and DVD Studio Pro 2.0.2--from Apple's Web site for free, the company said in a statement.

[rfouts]

Big screens and productivity

Unfortunately, the human brain doesn?t subscribe to ?Moore?s Law.? Our brains actually haven?t improved their processing capacity that much over the past decades. However, a larger screen is one way of tapping into the innate image processing capabilities of your audience (which are quite good).

Marketers that make heavy use of electronic communications should start thinking now about how they want to exploit larger display technology to their advantage.

Mark Raskino of Gartner says it best:

"When more information can be placed within our vision at once, we?re simply able to interpret and communicate the patterns and logic more readily."

While we still need analytical software, larger displays will go a long way to improving basic information work, similar to the way Moore?s Law provides more raw processing power for our computers.

Richard Fouts
CEO, Comunicado
http://comunicado.us