Going grey very quickly
Dwarfed by last week's Windows 2000 spectacular, Apple has speed-bumped its professional machines and revamped its mobile range.

At last week's MacWorld Expo in Tokyo, chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled an iBook Special Edition, which comes in a businesslike grey and sports a faster 366MHz processor than its lurid orange and blue predecessors.

The existing iBook range has had its standard memory increased to 64MB - up from the previous, paltry 32MB - and a 6GB hard drive, up from 3GB.

The Powerbook range has also been upgraded with processors running at up to 500MHz, two firewire ports and support for Apple's Airport wireless networking. The company is claiming the PowerPC chips make the top-end machine the "fastest portable ever".

The G4 line of professional desktop computers has also returned to the specification first announced by Jobs last year, with chips running at 400, 450 and 500MHz.

The company was forced into an embarrassing u-turn after that announcement, when it emerged that the fastest 500MHz chips could not be produced in the quantities needed to fulfil orders.

Speeds on the machines were temporarily lowered by 50MHz.

Get the Nak

Meet Nak - a curious-looking computer with a microphone. You could be speaking to it a lot in the future. Nak is a Linux-based personal digital assistant from Lernout & Hauspie (L&H), the speech and translation specialist, which has a full speech interface. That means you'll be able to dictate and listen to email, surf the web and even buy things online without lifting a finger to a keyboard. Gaston Bastiaens, president and chief executive of L&H, sees the company's technology taking off because handheld and mobile devices are difficult both to type into, and to read from. "The most intuitive, logical solution to this dilemma is a speech-enabled interface that allows users and machines to communicate in a simple, natural, hands-free manner," he says.