Apple goes for Quad power

Adding to its steady stream of recently announced products, Apple on Wednesday upgraded its Power Mac desktop and PowerBook laptops.

The new Power Mac G5 Quad has two 2.5GHz dual-core PowerPC G5 processors. At a press event at Apple headquarters, the company said all Power Macs will now feature dual-core chips and improved graphics cards.

"With quad-core processing, a new PCI Express architecture and the fastest workstation card from Nvidia, the new Power Mac G5 Quad is the most powerful system we've ever made," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement.

The new Power Macs will all include a FireWire 800 port, two FireWire 400 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 1.1 ports, optical and digital audio input and output, and built-in support for 802.11g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0.

Additionally:

• The Power Mac with a dual-core 2.0GHz PowerPC G5 processor is available now at £1,399. It includes 512MB of memory, a 160GB hard drive, an Nvidia GeForce 6600 LE video card, three PCI Express expansion slots and a 16x SuperDrive with double-layer support.
• The Power Mac with a dual-core 2.3GHz processor is available now at £1,749. It has a 250GB hard drive, the Nvidia GeForce 6600 and double the video memory at 256MB.
• The Power Mac G5 Quad with two dual-core 2.5GHz processors is priced at £2,299.01 and will be available next month. Other than the additional processor, it is equipped similarly to the single-chip, 2.3GHz model.

Apple's PowerBook notebooks are getting higher-resolution displays and improved batteries on the 15-inch and 17-inch models. All PowerBooks also will include a DVD-burning SuperDrive.

With the high-resolution displays, a new 17-inch PowerBook with 1680-by-1050 pixel resolution will be able to display 36 percent more information than previous models. A 15-inch PowerBook with a 1440-by-960-pixel resolution will display 26 percent more real estate. Also, the display on the 17-inch model is up to 46 percent brighter.

The PC upgrades are the latest in a flurry of recent product announcements by Apple. Last week, the company introduced an iPod capable of playing video and new iMacs with enhanced media functions. Last month, the company unveiled the slim iPod Nano and the Motorola-built Rokr mobile phone, which is capable of playing music and connecting with iTunes.

Also on Wednesday, Apple lowered the prices of its larger LCD displays. The 23-inch model drops to £949 and the 30-inch display falls to £1,799. It also launched a photo-processing application called Aperture.

The boost to Apple's pro laptop and desktop lines also comes ahead of the company's planned move to Intel-based chips. Apple reiterated last week that it expects to have Intel-based Macs in the market by next June, although the company has not commented on whether some models could come earlier than that.