Thursday, February 18, 1999

HAL talks to Dave about the Mac
Says he has four things to talk about today, essentially repeating the Macworld San Francisco keynote from last month
The next version had 4 goals: most powerful PC in the industry, best 2D and 3D graphics, most expandable, and the best design
Has Copper G3 chips running at 400 MHz, and shows benchmarks comparing fastest Pentium chip, old G3 and new G3
It takes a while for Phil to get on stage
Does a speed race between the fastest Pentium II computer, a Compaq Pentium II 450 MHz, and the new Power Macintosh G3 400 MHz, running a script in Photoshop to generate a poster and then revert back to blank
Bringing back hardware acceleration to the Power Macintosh G3, using the ATI Rage 128 with 16MB of memory
Shows the frames/second of the new Rage 128 against a Pentium II using a Voodoo 2 card
Runs Dark Vengeance on PC vs Mac, with the Mac running 20% faster
Will go with OpenGL for its 3D graphics library integrated into Mac OS
The new Power Macintosh G3 supports 1GB of RAM, and 100 GB of storage inside (with three bays capable of running IBM's 36GB hard drive)
Wants I/O ports to be industry standards, serial, and plug and play, so the new Power Mac G3 will have gigabit Ethernet, USB and Firewire ports
Talks about the history of SCSI from 1987, and how it's outdated
Does a demo of how you can plug a video camera into two Power Mac G3s and display the output video in real time
Does a demo of a portable 6GB drive powered by Firewire and can easily play a Barenaked Ladies video
Shows off the new design of the Power Mac G3, particularly the way you access the insides: "It's called a door"

"The Look of Love": Apple's Phil Schiller, Jony Ive, and Jon Rubenstein, RR Donnelley & Sons' Kevin Hekman, Adobe's Bruce Chizen, ComputerWare's Paul Ramirez, Eidos' Keith Boesky, Id's John Carmack, and Epson's Dan Crane talk about the new Power Macintosh G3
From August 15 to December 31, shipped 800,000 iMacs, the #1 selling computer model in the United States
32% of buyers are first time computer owners, 13% are switchers
Shares some of the market research they've done on the iMac rollout
Ups the processor on iMacs to 266 MHz, the hard drive to 6 GB, and lowers the price to $1199
Says the response to the new colors blueberry, grape, tangerine, lime and strawberry has been great
1,355 is an important number to Apple, it's the number of new and renewed Mac applications announced since the iMac unveil; 900 are in Japanese

Microsoft's Ben Waldman
Internet Explorer 4.5 & Outlook Express 4.5

Ben Waldman speaks his opening remarks in Japanese!

IE 4.5 crashes with an out-of-memory error
Supposes the prior management of Apple didn't like games, but they now want to try to be the best gaming platform in the world
Lists off some games coming to the Mac within the next 120 days: Tomb Raider III, SimCity 3000, Fly!, Rainbow Six, Imperialism II, Starcraft, Heretic II, Battle Zone, Quest for Glory V, Age of Empires, Myst II, and Quake
Speaks about John Carmack's demo of Quake Arena, and plays a recording of the game
Shows a picture of the Sony PlayStation to big applause. Then shows Connectix' Virtual Game Station, a PlayStation emulator for Macintosh
Plays Grand Turismo on a Macintosh
Does a quick recap on Mac OS 8.5 and Mac OS X Server
Does a demo, with a $4999 PowerMac G3 configured as a server, and a client iMac with its hard drive removed
Shows off a "classroom" of 49 iMacs in a 7 x 7 structure, and attempts to get them all to request video for the server

The wall of iMacs do not work for several minutes