April Fool's Day

This had such a big impact that I sent off a warning later in the day that it wasn't for real. The real G5's were announced in June at WWDC and started to ship in Sep/Oct 2003.

Posted : 1 April 03

Ok this is the big one for the year. The IBM PowerPC 970 chip that Apple has been working on behind the scenes is about to hit. Apple announced to dealers last night that the G5 will be arriving with 2 weeks. As I found out independently of the non disclosure agreement that the dealers are tied into I'm spilling the beans now.

Most unexpectedly, Apple has released (finally) a 2 button mouse with a scroll wheel. This matches the new wireless keyboard. The top end G5 is a quad processor 2.3Ghz beast. This is certain to blow the fastest PC's out of the water completely.

The new PowerPC 970 chip has been used in IBM's high end servers for a short while and has been redesigned slightly for the new G5 range. Still included is internal multi-threading (as per Intel's 3Ghz chip) & 64 bit processing.

Word is for 3 models as per with previous releases of G4 desktops. Pricing, info and pictures to follow. Supposedly the case design has been radically redesigned, but as I haven't seen it yet I can't comment. Reaction has been mixed to this new case but it's what it inside that is most important.

Overall specs are impressive :
Released with Mac OS X 10.2.5 (which supports processor multi-threading)
PC3200 400MHz dual channel DDR RAM
- maximum RAM is now 8GB when using the latest 1GB RAM chips (not yet released)
Serial ATA and 133MHz IDE
800Mbps Firewire
USB 2
PCI X
Redesigned motherboard using the latest technology
Bluetooth wireless mouse and keyboard
Airport Extreme ready
Built in hardware RAID (only on the 133MHz IDE bus)
GeForce 4 Ti and Radeon 9700 display cards with 8x AGP
- which card depends on the particular G5 ordered

Model 1
G5/1.4GHz SP 256MB RAM/80GB HD/Combo
Model 2
G5/1.8GHz DP 256MB RAM/120GB HD/Superdrive
Model 3
G5/2.3GHz QP 512MB RAM/Dual 120GB HD RAID/Superdrive

Pricing is supposed to be similar to previous G4's. The top end model is likely to be a month or more away. The 2 lower end models will be available almost immediately. Expect the news and web sites to be full of this release soon as this is far too big to not leak very almost immediately.