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Cranking It Up A Notch (5/31/99)
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Yeah, sure, okay, you've heard it all before: the blue and white G3s are slated to receive a "speed bump," which will increase the processor speeds in shipping models without increasing the prices of the configurations. We last expected that to happen way back in April, but what we got were the same old (if you can call a three-month old computer line "old") systems running between 300 and 400 MHz. This time, though, it's for real. And even if you don't believe Apple Insider, who broke the story earlier, you're probably unlikely to doubt the Apple Store itself.
That's right-- the new configurations are official. They're posted and ready for ordering (though whether or not they're actually ready for shipment is beyond the reach of our fledgling psychic abilities). Apple's new bottom-of-the-barrel Power Mac now sports a 350 MHz G3 and a full megabyte of backside cache, along with 64 MB of RAM, a 6 GB hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, and the standard RAGE 128 graphics and fast Ethernet-- all for the same low price of $1599. Kick in another $400 and you can move up to the mid-range system, which boosts the processor speed to 400 MHz and replaces the CD-ROM with a DVD-ROM instead, complete with video decoding so you can watch "Holy Man" the way it was meant to be seen, complete with all its subtle nuances and in its full cinematic glory. At the high end of the spectrum, you can now opt for a 450 MHz processor; if you go the build-to-order route and keep all the extras to a minimum, you can buy one for as low at $2159.
So there you have it. What better way to celebrate the advent of June than by blowing a wad of hard-earned cash on a brand-spankin'-new G3? Now you can get more pure processing power for your dollar than ever before. We're mighty tempted down here at AtAT studios, but we've got our chunk of change set aside for a P1 whenever they ship; we're still in 68K-ville on the portable side, and we've got to keep our priorities straight.
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SceneLink (1569)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/31/99 episode: May 31, 1999: Best Buy's still out to lunch, and the Sears rollout leaves a bit to be desired, but CompUSA shows signs of actual Mac-awareness. Meanwhile, Apple cranks up the juice in the Power Mac G3 lineup, and PowerBook customers everywhere hope that the recent report of actual shipping 101s isn't just a mirage...
Other scenes from that episode: 1568: Constant Drama In Retail (5/31/99) Believe it or not, some of us harbored a mild sense of guarded optimism when Best Buy signed back on to sell iMacs. Sure, we remembered what it was like in the Performa days, and we hadn't forgotten that Best Buy was the first national retailer to jump ship when Apple started jettisoning its retail partners like so much bad fish... 1570: Open The Floodgates (5/31/99) Speaking of "whenever they ship," we doubt we're the only ones who were expecting another Wall Street-esque PowerBook drought with the new "bronze" PowerBooks. When Steve Jobs took the wraps off the new thinner, lighter, faster, longer-lasting, translucent-keyboard-and-trackpad-button model at the Worldwide Developers Conference in early May, we're pretty sure he said that the luscious new laptops would be shipping no later than the 20th...
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