PowerMac Pro G4

will come in 3 models with G4 CPUs of 400, 450 and 500 MHz. These models will have respectively 64,128 and 256 MB RAM; 10, 20 and 27 GB Ultra ATA/66 hard drives; CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and DVD-RAM and sell for an astounding $1599, $2499 and $3499! The 400 MHz is shipping today, the 450 MHz will ship in a couple of weeks and the 500 MHz a couple of weeks after the 450.

Phil Schiller was conducting a demo of the 500 MHz model using Photoshop 5 against a 600 MHz Pentium III Compaq. The G4 blew the PIII away and while waiting for the PIII to finish, I lost the QuickTime video feed and could not reconnect. I couldn't even connect with "www.apple.com" but I could connect to the Apple Store at "store.apple.com" and other Apple servers. The G4 was not posted on the Apple Store as of 1:30p EDT.

Update: I got through to www.apple.com about 1:45p EDT. There's an image of the new G4 and an image of an Apple Cinema Display from the same page. I did not hear Steve announce this monitor since I lost the QT video right at the end and could not reconnect.

More to come on the keynote news items [See Wednesday's edition].

[11:30a EDT] Sorry for the outage yesterday and this morning. The problem turned out to be a corrupted open transport extension file (OpenTpt Remote Access) on my PowerBook which kept me from reaching the internet. Please stay tuned for a report on Steve Jobs' keynote address at the Seybold Publishing Conference '99 that will be starting in a few minutes.