Swayed by popular demand, Apple Computer Inc. Tuesday decided to offer its new eMac — originally intended only
for the education market — to consumers.
“Consumers have pounded on the table demanding to buy the eMac, and we agree,” said Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple.
“The eMac’s production ramp is ahead of schedule, so we’ll have enough eMacs this quarter to satisfy both our education and
non-education customers.”
When the eMac was first released in April, the only consumers able to buy it were those who could prove they home-school their
children. But, according to reviews, the eMac is a
considerable improvement over the old iMac, offering a high-resolution 17-inch (16-inch viewable) instead of 15-inch CRT monitor,
without the premium price of the current, 15-inch-LCD iMac.
The eMac also takes up slightly less desk space than the iMac, and offers 16.7 million colors at up to 1,280 by 960 resolution,
driven by a 32MB Nvidia GeForce2 MX graphics accelerator. The iMac was limited to 1,024 by 768 pixels.
Additionally, the eMac comes with the same 700MHz PowerPC G4 processor as the iMac, 128MB of SDRAM, CD-RW optical drive, 40GB ATA
hard disk, integrated 16-watt digital amplifier and stereo speakers, Mac OS 10.1.4, and AirPort 802.11b wireless plus 10/100Mbps
wired networking support as base models of the glamorous new iMac. Two FireWire ports and five USB ports (three on the system, two
on the keyboard) connect to printers, scanners, digital cameras, camcorders, or external storage devices.
The software bundle includes Quicken Deluxe 2002, Appleworks, QuickTime, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mac OS X Mail, WorldBook Mac
OS X Edition, PCalc, OttoMatic, Deimos Rising and Acrobat Reader. It also includes the iPhoto software, iMovie 2 and iTunes.
Apple has decided to offer it to consumers for $1,099.