To the delight of the Macworld hordes gathered in San Francisco this week, Apple boss Steve Jobs pronounced the "death of the cathode ray tube" in his keynote address.
The comment came as he unveiled the radically redesigned iMac - the first complete overhaul the machine has had since it was launched three years ago.
"This is the best thing we've done," said Jobs, unnecessarily hyping up the already ecstatic crowd of Mac-lovers inside the Moscone Convention Centre. Jobs always says that about new products. But one thing is certainly true: this is easily the most visually striking new product Apple has ever produced - and for the company that brought you flower power iMacs and the Zen-like simplicity of the Cube, that's going some.
The iMac's taken quite a makeover. From head on, the new 15-inch flat panel LCD display appears to float unsupported above a white plastic dome that houses the iMac's disk drives and other innards. From behind, you can see the chrome arm that holds the display, and allows it to spin through 360 degrees and a variety of angles with no more effort than the pushing of a finger. The ports for peripherals - including an ample five USB ports - are discreetly cut into the dome's rear.
From side on, the new iMac looks like no other computer - a lot like a kitsch desk lamp, perhaps. It is already being likened to the animated lamp that appears in the famous promotional short film for Pixar, the animation company that created Toy Story. Steve Jobs is Pixar's chief executive, too.
Whatever it resembles, it is an incredibly bold design for a computer that Apple needs to see attain mainstream success. During his keynote, Jobs touted the six million iMacs sold in the three years of its first incarnations, when the boxes went from old-fashioned blueberry to outrageous Dalmatian spots, via muted greys and vivid slime green. The machine had, said Jobs, "changed the way we look at technology, and had influence way beyond the technology industry".
But the fact is that the iMac was long past the peak of its popularity - although still Apple's top-selling computer, in the third quarter of 2001 shipments were down 49% on the previous year, to 294,000 units. The company badly needed a revamp, and a flat panel iMac had long been rumoured. The fact it wasn't announced last year was probably down to the high cost and restricted availability of quality LCD screens. Now it's here, the iMac will be expected to not only sell well into the Mac community, but help win new users from the Windows PC world and help break Apple out of its tiny, sub-5% share of the desktop market. And, aside from the new machine's quirky looks, the success or not of that drive will be down to the software it can run.
Apple's big bet is on making the iMac - and its iBook portable cousin - the "digital hub" of gadget-filled homes. The company wants to make its machines the obvious place to manage your digital camera, camcorder and MP3 collections. For instance; you can cut a video tape full of birthday parties you never watch into compelling three-minute shorts using iMovie, Apple's free movie-editing software, and then burn them onto a DVD using iDVD, the free DVD-making package.
Also announced this week was the final part of the i-software jigsaw - iPhoto. Long on Mac-users' wishlists, iPhoto is a fantastically easy way to catalogue, prepare and share your photographs. And for US users, includes - Microsoft Windows style - close integration with third-party's services. Using the one-click ordering made famous by Amazon, iPhoto users can assemble whole albums or even hardback books of pictures and order them from Kodak, to be dispatched to home, office or - in Jobs' case - his mother in law. This, however, will only work for US users initially - UK users will have to content themselves with producing online slide-shows automatically, or printing out their own albums at home.
The new hardware and software announced this week fills in the gaping holes in Apple's year-old digital hub strategy. What remains to be seen is if the public takes to the hub as fast as it already has to the peripherals, such as the camcorders, DVD players and digital cameras, that feed into it.
iMac: Completely revised, and set to appear in three versions, although it will take until March for all of them to be on sale. The old CRT iMac remains on sale for the time being, and continues to offer a sub-£700 route into the Mac range.
· All the new machines sport a 15 inch LCD screen, with the equivalent viewing area of a 17inch CRTdisplay.
· The basic model has a 700MHz G4 processor, 128MB of memory, a 40GB hard drive and CD-RW. Sadly, it won't be shipping until late March. £977.97, plus VAT.
· The middle version is simi lar, but have 256MB of memory and a "combo" CD-RW & DVD player. Shipping late February. £1105.53, plus VAT.
· The top of the range iMac has a 800MHz G4 processor, 256Mb of memory, a 60Gb hard drive and the Superdrive - a CD and DVD reader and writer. Shipping in 4-6 weeks, £1,360.85, plus VAT.
iBook: Almost ignored among the hype for the new iMac, Apple's attractive consumer laptop now has a new top of the range model with a larger, 14-inch display. The case has been proportionately expanded - and Apple claims this has the bonus of allowing an extra hour of battery life - making six hours in total. It has a 600MHz G3 processor, 256MB memory, a 20GB hard drive, and is shipping. £1,360.85, plus VAT.
iPhoto: Apple's new picture organiser, editor and publisher makes managing your digital picture collection a lot easier. Rumoured to have been launched to the displeasure of Adobe, which makes the expensive pro-picture editing Photoshop software, iPhoto allows consumers to collect images off their camera, view thumbnail images and organise them with a single click. Further clicks and pull-down menus make it easy to crop the images, publish the images to Apple's iTools service for the world to see over the web, or print them out. It threatens to take a lot of the tedium out of dealing with digital images. Free and available to download now from www.apple.com
OS X: The new operating system, finally ready for prime-time, will be the default on Macs from the end of this month - although OS 9 will still be available for those who want it, and old OS 9 applications will still run.
