At keynote address, Steve reveals new G4 Cube, dual-processor Macs, new mouse and keyboard, new monitors; new iMacs

Cube The biggest announcement Steve Jobs made at yesterday's Macworld Expo keynote address was for an entirely new line of Macs, called the Power Mac G4 Cube. The Cube itself is only about 8 inches square, yet it packs a punch that is almost the size of Apple's full-size G4 Macs. The Cubes come with a newly designed set of Harmon-Kardon speakers and a slot-loading DVD drive. The inside of the Cube can be easily accessed by turning it upside down in lifting a handle that takes the entire unit out of its clear plastic enclosure. An impressively elegant design. Priced at $1799 for the 450MHz model and $2299 for the 500MHz model, these Macs will likely appeal most to those that would have otherwise selected a low-end Power Mac G4, especially if the smaller footprint of the Cube is a significant factor in the choice. The Cubes will be available in early August. To go with your Cube, you get a choice of three new Mac displays: an entirely new 17" completely flat CRT display (it comes with 2 USB ports) or newly enhanced versions of Apple's 15 inch flat-panel and 22 inch Cinema Display. All three monitors connect to the Macs via only one cable. The cable contains the equivalent of a USB cord, a power cord and a monitor connector all-in-one. Regarding the new monitors, Mike Briggs notes: "Apple's new monitors use a proprietary new connection interface (ADC). The new Macs only have one ADC port and no video card manufacturer makes a card with this port as yet. This seems to mean that you cannot use dual monitors with these new Macs." Mark Fosgate replies: "While Apple has included the ADC connector on its new machines, they also include a standard VGA connector. Currently, the G4 Cube has only the one connector on the ATI card but I'm sure some company will soon have multiple monitor support on one card. On the G4MPs, an additional card can be installed to give additional monitor support for those that need it." Update: Apple's tech specs for the G4 Cube confirms that the cube does come with a "15-pin mini D-Sub VGA connector." Dual-processor Macs Also announced were two new dual-processor Power Mac G4s: a dual 450MHz and a dual 500MHz. They will cost exactly the same as the current single processor G4s. The low-end 400MHz G4 remains a single processor model. A demo showed how, when running Photoshop (which is optimized for both the G4's Velocity Engine and the multiple processors), a complex task took about half the time on a dual-processor G4 than on a 1GHz Pentium III. They also ship with 1Gb Ethernet and larger hard drives. As with the Velocity engine, the advantage of dual processors will only be evident when using software that has been designed to recognize and take advantage of them. Mac OS X Steve also gave an updated demo of Mac OS X, noting that the new OS will fully support the multiprocessing feature of the new G4s. He also mentioned in passing that the public-beta of Mac OS X would be released in "early September," with the official release in "early 2001." This implies yet another delay (as the official release had been previously promised for January 2001). New mouse and keyboard The announcement that will have the broadest appeal for Mac users is that of a new optical mouse and a full-sized Pro keyboard. These will now be standard across the entire desktop Mac line. They replace the components that first shipped with the original iMacs (and every desktop Mac subsequently released) and have been a source of criticism ever since. Especially exciting was the new mouse. Because it is optical, it has no moving parts. It also has no "button." Instead, the entire upper surface of the mouse itself can "clicked" to serve as a button. Shaped as an oval rather than round, it also works on virtually any surface (thus eliminating the need for a mouse pad). When we tried one out, we very much liked the "feel" of the new design and expect this to be a real winner. As a surprise bonus, Apple gave a free mouse to everyone who attended the keynote! They will otherwise be available for sale for $59 in September. Actually, only those in the hall where Steve was speaking got a mouse (a card to redeem to get one was hidden under each chair). This led to complaints from those forced to the overflow room that they should have gotten one as well. Numerous people in the hall left several minutes early (we had to do this to get to a talk we were giving) - and similarly missed out on the free mouse. Darn! New iMacs A minor upgrade to the iMac line was introduced. Changes include new colors (Indigo, Ruby, Sage and Snow), faster processors and larger disk storage. It also has an improved ATI RAGE 128 PRO 4XL graphics card. Perhaps the most significant new feature of the new Macs was the price point: the low end model now starts at only $799. iMovie 2 Also announced was an iMovie upgrade: iMovie 2. It features enhanced audio editing (e.g., voice-overs) and new special effects. Related to this, Steve showed off an enhanced version of Apple's iTool's HomePage. It now lets you post live streaming video to the Web pages created by HomePage, so you can put your iMovie videos online via Apple's servers for free. Microsoft A Microsoft representative gave a demo of the forthcoming Office 2001 (due in October), introducing its new packaging design (it will come in a small round plastic case). The new design is consistent with Microsoft's general theme that the new Office will be more Mac-like than ever. It also means that Office 2001 comes with no printed documentation. A Microsoft Web page has more details. Finally, Microsoft promised that the entire line of Microsoft games would be ported to the Mac, including its newly acquired (from Bungie) Halo. However, it did not say how soon Halo will be released for the Mac. Expo highlights: Day one: Rewind; TechTool Pro 3; VirusBarrier; CopyAgent; Pro Tools; Harmon-Kardon speakers Here are the highlights of what we saw on the Expo floor yesterday, of special interest for troubleshooting: Rewind We saw a demo of Power On's forthcoming Rewind application. If you accidentally delete or even overwrite a file, you can get it back via Rewind. The ability to recover an overwritten file is something that more traditional undelete utilities cannot do. This feature allows you to return to any previously saved version of a document. For example, if you decide that you prefer the way you had originally written something two days ago, instead of the way it now reads, but did not save a copy of the older version, Rewind will retrieve it for you. You can also rewind to easily uninstall software, no matter how many files were installed in no matter how many different locations. You can even rewind to get rid of a recent virus infection. Perhaps Rewind's most exciting feature is its ability to startup your drive in emergency situations (such as when you can't get past a blinking question icon at startup). Just hold down the R key at startup, and your Mac should boot to a special Rewind Emergency Startup "disk" that contains any repair utilities (such as Disk First Aid or TechTool Pro) that you may have: thereby not only allowing you to startup, but to fix the problem with your drive. Rewind works its magic by maintaining the information needed to "rewind" in an area of your hard drive that is partitioned off for its exclusive use. The larger the size you select, the farther back in time Rewind will work. It compresses all the information it stores, so that it takes up less space than you would otherwise expect. This area is also where it keeps its Startup disk image. As long as your drive is not so messed up that even this separate pseudo-partition is inaccessible, the emergency startup feature should work. A caveat: All of these claims are based entirely on the demo we saw. It will still be at least several more weeks before we get to test this out for ourselves via a beta copy. It's not scheduled to ship as a release version until the 4th quarter. TechTool Pro 3 We also got our first chance to look at the forthcoming TechTool Pro 3 from Micromat. It features a new conflict checking feature that works by scanning your drive for potential conflicts, comparing your software to a database of known conflicts. Obviously, for this to be most effective, the database will need to be updated often. TechTool Pro also adds a virus detection feature and a new user interface that provides easier access to all the different tests that TechTool Pro does. VirusBarrier Intego was previewing its new VirusBarrier application. CopyAgent Connectix, as expected, released CopyAgent. This utility is the answer to all those who wanted the Copy feature of Speed Doubler to return in a Mac OS 9 compatible application. We received a user report that Connectix will make the $39 CopyAgent available online at a discount for registered Speed Doubler users soon, perhaps later this week. Pro Tools TechTracker (our new parent company) was demonstrating its forthcoming Pro Tools. It will allow you to track a customized list of just the software most relevant to you, automatically informing you of updates and bug reports. Harmon Kardon speakers Harmon-Kardon is selling a new three-piece speaker system. It includes the iSub subwoofer originally sold for the iMac together with a pair of iSoundsticks. They now work with any USB-capable Mac.