Macworld Tokyo was yesterday (well, last night Eastern US time.) Pretty much as expected, but there are always a few surprises. New speed bumped and CD/RW sporting imacs (G3s at 400/500/600 mhz.) Apple missed the ball on CD/RW (they were pushing DVD/RAM for the last 2 years) but now that they have changed course they have easily made up for lost time. Big Cube price drops, with the entry level 450 G4 now dropped to $1250. And a huge price drop for the all singing all dancing Mac 22 inch Cinema Display. Now only ("only!") $2999 (from $3999.) This is actually pretty good, seeing as others have 18 inch flat panels (sgi) for $3200+. These prices should continue to drop fast as flat panel technology is rapidly improving. Maybe $1999 by Christmas?
And for gamers, and other tech spec freaks, the big, almost totally unexpected news, is that the new NVIDIA GeForce3 (previously known as the NV20) is going to be available for the Mac. This is huge news for Apple, as WinTel has always had a lead in the gaming market. But the GeForce3 is not only coming to the Mac, it's coming to the Mac before WinTel. Amazing. I wonder how Jobs cut that deal. Must be pretty hard to convince a manufacturer to support your platform when you have < 5% of the market. Anyway, this is going to take gaming to the next level. (Yes, I know that is meaningless hype-speak, but this will be the most advanced graphics card.) They had John Carmack on stage (master mind behind Quake, and all around programmer hero) and he was demoing a preview of the Doom3 engine running on MacOSX. He says that full cinematic 3d quality is now possible. All the 3d characters are rendered in Maya (!) which was also demonstrated running on OSX. I've never been into these games, but I am certainly interested in the state of the art, and I keep wondering when we're going to get to these 3d virtual worlds I started reading about in '89. We're still a way off, but clearly making progress. And the GeForce3 will at least give the battered Apple some bragging rights.
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And for gamers, and other tech spec freaks, the big, almost totally unexpected news, is that the new NVIDIA GeForce3 (previously known as the NV20) is going to be available for the Mac. This is huge news for Apple, as WinTel has always had a lead in the gaming market. But the GeForce3 is not only coming to the Mac, it's coming to the Mac before WinTel. Amazing. I wonder how Jobs cut that deal. Must be pretty hard to convince a manufacturer to support your platform when you have < 5% of the market. Anyway, this is going to take gaming to the next level. (Yes, I know that is meaningless hype-speak, but this will be the most advanced graphics card.) They had John Carmack on stage (master mind behind Quake, and all around programmer hero) and he was demoing a preview of the Doom3 engine running on MacOSX. He says that full cinematic 3d quality is now possible. All the 3d characters are rendered in Maya (!) which was also demonstrated running on OSX. I've never been into these games, but I am certainly interested in the state of the art, and I keep wondering when we're going to get to these 3d virtual worlds I started reading about in '89. We're still a way off, but clearly making progress. And the GeForce3 will at least give the battered Apple some bragging rights.
- jim 2-22-2001 3:15 pm