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iMac: "U.S.A. All The Way!" (2/23/01)
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We all know that Steve Jobs has it in for the English, what with cancelling appearances at UK trade shows, ditching the British-localised version of the Mac OS, and slashing UK-based marketing jobs a couple of years ago. But on the flip side, we always figured that Japan was in Apple's good graces; certain Apple products (such as, say, the Strawberry iMac) really seemed targeted more at the tastes of the Japanese market than anything else, and Apple's always making a big deal about how Mac OS X is going to ship with some really superb Japanese fonts. In short, while we expect England to get kicked around every once in a while, we never expected Apple to stick Japan with the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
According to The Register, though, that's just what happened-- but don't worry, the UK got shafted just like Japan did, so at least some things never change. In fact, this time around, it appears that the entire non-U.S. world is getting some second-class hardware. Apparently Apple's new mid-range 500 MHz iMac packs a shiny, new PowerPC 750cx chip here in the States, but overseas it's only got the older PowerPC 750. The 750cx, you may recall, boasts 256 KB of on-chip cache running at the same clock speed as the processor itself, while the older 750 has 512 KB of backside cache, which runs at a much lower frequency. Oh, and that's not all-- whereas the U.S. version of the 500 MHz iMac also features a Rage 128 Ultra graphics chip with 16 MB of video RAM, the overseas version has the old Rage 128 Pro (admittedly, almost the same exact chip) but with only 8 MB of video RAM. Sounds like Apple's keeping all the newest goodies on native soil.
Whether or not these hardware differences will result in any perceivable performance gap is questionable; we'll have to wait for the benchmarks to know for sure. Still, we found it noteworthy that Apple would apparently choose to hoard newer (and probably better) parts for U.S.-bound iMacs while unloading older material overseas. Then again, there's also the distinct possibility that all the iMacs are the same and Apple's web sites just aren't showing the correct specs yet-- but where's the fun in that? We'll take the possibility of corporate nationalism run rampant over a simple typo any day of the week. Why, we can just picture Uncle Steve in red, white, and blue, waving Old Glory now...
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 2/23/01 episode: February 23, 2001: The pro-"Flower Power" backlash was minimal, to say the least-- is anyone going to buy these things? Meanwhile, iReview dies a sudden and quiet death, and Apple might be trying to ditch older hardware overseas while keeping all the best goodies here in the States...
Other scenes from that episode: 2883: Someone Must Like This (2/23/01) Hmmm, well, so much for our pattern recognition skills. Way back when Uncle Steve first fried the retinas of the world with the dangerously bright Key Lime iBook last September, we made it clear that, based on the images posted to Apple's web site, we had to file Apple's new radioactive hue squarely in the "Fashion Don't" category... 2884: It's Tough To Be A Critic (2/23/01) Alas, poor iReview; we hardly knew ye. When Apple's collection of web site reviews first debuted a little over a year ago, it was a joke; while it boasted some nifty features (such as letting iTools members append their own user reviews to Apple's official ones), only a handful of sites were represented, so it fell far short of its stated intent of being a useful one-stop resource for surfers looking for the best and worst of the web...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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