Apple Offers eMac To Consumers

Apple

Unveiled in late April, the eMac originally was targeted only at the education market. But Cupertino-based Apple said the all-in-one computer, which resembles the popular iMac G3 desktop, has drawn strong interest from consumers. When the eMac was introduced, some Apple VARs said they wouldn't be surprised to see Apple eventually offer the product--its lowest-priced model with a PowerPC G4 processor--to the retail market.

"Consumers have pounded on the table demanding to buy the eMac, and we agree," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. "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."

Two eMac models shipped last month for education customers, but Apple is currently offering only one model to the retail market. The consumer model, available now at a list price of $1,099, features a new CD-RW drive and modem configuration, as well as the 17-inch flat CRT monitor and 700MHz G4 processor offered in the initial eMacs.

Other features include 128 Mbytes of SDRAM, a 40-Gbyte ATA hard drive, built-in 10/100BaseT Ethernet, a 56K V.90 modem, airport wireless networking support, a 16-watt digital amplifier and stereo speakers, five USB ports, two FireWire ports, and Nvidia GeForce2 MX AGP 2X graphics with 32 Mbytes of Double Data Rate video memory.

In addition, Apple said on Tuesday that the public preview version of its QuickTime 6 streaming media software is now available as a free download from its Web site for both Mac and Windows platforms. QuickTime 6 is the first mainstream MPEG-4 solution for streaming media, according to the company.

Apple also unveiled the public preview version of QuickTime Broadcaster, its software for capturing and encoding QuickTime content in MPEG-4 for live streaming over the Web.