NEWS •FEBRUARY 19, 2001
Apple Ships High-End G4 with SuperDrive
New 733 MHz model sports four 64-bit PCI slots

by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

Apple today announced that it's shipping the 733 MHz G4 with the Pioneer SuperDrive, several weeks earlier than expected. Apple announced the model last month at the Macworld conference in San Francisco. The SuperDrive is a combination CD-RW and DVD-R, which means it can read and write CDs and DVDs. DVDs created with the SuperDrive can be played on consumer DVD devices.

The new G4 has a 733 MHz processor with 256 KB level-2 onchip cache and 1MB level 3 backside cache; 256MB of PC133 SDRAM memory; 60GB Ultra ATA/100 hard disk drive; an AGP 4x slot; NVIDIA GeForce2 MX with 32MB video SDRAM; CD-RW/DVD-R SuperDrive; two FireWire and USB ports; four full-length 64-bit PCI slots at 33 MHz and 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet. It also includes a built-in 56 Kbps modem and is AirPort ready.

The machine also ships with iDVD, Apple's DVD authoring system that encodes video and audio for DVD playback and includes tools for building interactive menus. The program uses the new architecture of the G4's Velocity engine to encode DVDs through software at two times realtime, significantly faster than standard software encoding. The encoding does not include variable bit rate but instead uses a high-quality constant bit rate that speeds up encoding but also limits the amount of data that can be placed on a DVD to about an hour.

The new model is available now for $3,499. A fivepack of 4.7 GB DVD media is also available for $49.95. For more information, visit http://www.apple.com.

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