Apple's Jobs confirms launch of Macinteltosh

STEVE JOBS, Apple's CEO, left the most important announcements at his keynote speech at Macworld to the end, when he announced the introduction of an Intel based desktop iMac. He also introduced the Macbook Pro, which is an Intel laptop with a claimed five times performance gain over Powerbook G4s.

According to news.com, Intel CEO Paul Otellini hopped onto the stage at Macworld in a bunny suit and handed him a wafer and said his firm was ready. The same wire reported Jobs as saying that Apple was ready too.

The iMac comes in a similar form factor to existing machines using Power PC processors but will have a performance surge. Somewhat ironic, considering that Apple's previous marchitectural gigs had the Power PC as being a better chip than the X86, but hey, that's the past. Apple will dump all of its Power based machines in favour of Chipzilla chips during 2006.

The iMac Pro will be available from today and will use the dual core Yonah, er Duo chips that Intel majored on at the Consumer Electronics Show last week.

Other announcements include an accessory for the iPod which will be an FM tuner as well as a remote control. He said that the iPhoto has a new version, while Apple said that it has added a Spodcast Studio feature to Garageband.

Jobs said Apple sold 14 million iPods over the holiday period, compared to 4.5 million in the same period in the previous year. It's the first quarter in which retail sales of iPods will sell $1 billion worth. The firm also struck a deal with Saturday Night Live for download on iTunes. Apple's cher price was up sharply to over $81 on the news.

More detail at news.com.

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* You're wondering about the specs, right? For graphics it's got an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM and dual link DVI. Full spec of the notebook, here.