Before a crowd of Wall Street analysts in Cupertino, Calif. and remotely in New York City, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the company’s goal is to bring the SuperDrive to consumer Macs, like the iMac, sometime next year.
“I think that it’s possible to bring the SuperDrive down into our consumer products next calendar year, 2002,” Jobs said. “I think we have to make enough of them and bring the cost down. Standard stuff, but it takes time.”
Jobs said Apple’s new iDVD software will be very popular, usable by low-end consumers and ready for Apple PCs like the iMac, “when they are available in high enough volume and manufacturing becomes cost-reduced enough to put into consumer products, which I expect will be next year.”
The DVD-R/CD-RW SuperDrive comes only on high-end Power Mac G4 models operating at 733MHz. The SuperDrive-equipped Power Mac G4s are the first computers to ship with hardware and software to record DVD titles for playback on most standard DVD players.
The DVD-R/CD-RW SuperDrive, made by Pioneer, reads DVD titles at 6x (7.8 megabytes per second), and writes to 4.7-gigabyte DVD-R discs at 2x (2.6 megabytes per second). The SuperDrive also reads CDs at 24x, writes to CD-R at 8x, and writes to CD-RW at 4x. It supports DVD-Video, DVD-ROM and DVD-R, as well as CD-ROM, CD-Audio, CD-R, CD-RW, CDI, CD Bridge, CD Extended, CD Mixed Mode and Photo CD media.
MacCentral is monitoring the meeting and will provide additional details as they become available.