iMac's flavours tempt computer newcomers

By Adam Gifford

According to Apple, 32 per cent of the 800,000 iMacs sold since its August launch last year went to first-time buyers.

"That means their first experience of computing is a pleasant one," said Paul Johnston, head of New Zealand distributor Renaissance's Apple division.

Existing users upgrading accounted for 31 per cent, and 24 per cent were people buying an iMac in addition to their existing Apple machine.

Thirteen per cent of the Bondi blue machines went to people switching from Wintel machines (PCs with Intel chips running the Windows operating system) - higher than Apple was expecting.

Apple hopes buyer adherence to "standard" technology will be tested by its latest offerings - a beefed-up iMac for the consumer market and a blueberry-and-cream G3 Power Macintosh for professional users.

"Consumers trust manufacturers to produce a computer which will do what they want it to do. What they also want is for it to look good in their home," Mr Johnston said.

The second batch of iMacs come in five "flavours, not colours" - strawberry, lime, blueberry, tangerine and grape. The blueberry is already proving the most popular, followed by lime.

Under the hood is a 266 MHz G3 processor, a 6 Gb hard-drive, built-in modem and 10/100Base-TX Ethernet. It costs about $2800 plus GST.

"Another year, another revolution" is how Apple tags the Power Macintosh G3, which is a complete revision of the previous generation. It features new copper-based PowerPC processors running at 300 MHz, 350 MHz or 400 MHz. The translucent case with handles at each corner boasts the same polycarbonate used for bulletproof shields. It starts at $3696 ex-GST. A 17-inch monitor costs $1187.

A simple latch means one side drops open for service or adding extra memory (up to 1 Gb) to the four DIMM slots. There are three drive bays, allowing up to 100Gb of storage, and increased expansion through three 64-bit 33 MHz PCI slots - plus an ATI RAGE 128 graphics accelerator and 16 Mb of graphics memory as standard.

Mr Johnston said that a week after it first became available, 500 units had been ordered. Full stock should be available here by mid-March.

Where Apple has taken its biggest risk is with its refusal to look too far backwards. That means no internal floppy, no SCSI port (although SCSI PCI cards will be available). Instead, the G3 has two USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports and two FireWire ports.

The reason: faster performance. While SCSI operates at 80Mb a second, FireWire runs at 400, is hot pluggable, which means devices can be joined up with applications running, and carries power so that peripherals don't need their own power supply.

USB can handles 12Mb of traffic a second, compared with 0.4Mb through a parallel port. USB also means Apple users can use the same printers and other peripheral as PC users, benefiting from the economies of scale.